Our Beginning: 3 friends

Nancy Clark has been the guiding force behind the growth of WomensMedia. A physics and geology graduate from Berkeley, she can make the claim that she started out in rocket science. Nancy’s background began with space science technology with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, expanded to computer technology for business applications, and then evolved into the design of gender and ethnic equity programs for the University of California. For twenty-five years, she has donated her spare time and energy to nonprofit organizations reaching out to women of all ethnicities.

She founded WomensMedia three years ago with her friends Dianne Schilling and Susanna Palomares, two women with extensive experience in management training and educational publishing. They wanted to provide more in-depth material for working women than has been available on the Internet. Dianne and Susanna told Nancy, "You decide what you need and let us know. This’ll be a worthwhile endeavor."

Our Reach: Women across the globe

We now have 25,000 women visiting our site each month, and almost 20% are from outside the U.S. We’re pleased to have many members from the U.K., Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and India.

Our Promise: Information you can trust

For the first three years, we "passed a hat" at the end of every month to pay the bills. We didn’t want to accept advertising dollars because we wanted women to know they could trust our information—that it wasn’t biased towards sponsors.

You Tell Us: We'll give you what you want

We know you’re intelligent and we know you’re busy. We also know you’re on the Internet for two reasons:

• To keep important relationships going, and
• To find information—tools for your life.

Sometimes we’ve presented articles which did not interest you—we removed them. Some articles were interesting to nearly everyone who visited—we expanded those topics. Now we’ve put up discussion forums, so use them to talk about your ideas for our site and let us know. We’re interested in putting thousands of heads together every month. Who knows what super ideas might emerge?

We ask you to:

• Help other women with their problems through our discussion groups.
• Tell us when there's an expert we should feature.
• Tell us how to improve our service—and help us with that.
• Work with us on Computers Are For Girls, whether you're a parent, teacher, psychologist, or an information specialist.

Giving Back: Computers Are For Girls

Whether you have children or not, we think you’ll appreciate our commitment to our own giving back program: Computers Are For Girls. Part of every dollar we earn goes to this start-up endeavor. In the future, we will pay for the development of software for teachers, parents, and students to download and use free of charge. Our focus is on young girls up through the age of ten. This is where we think we can make the biggest difference. This is when girls—in great numbers - decide computers are for boys. When these girls are women, they’ll most likely be using computers at work, but they won’t enjoy the technology salary benefits. They also won’t be involved in designing software products that appeal to women. Our goal is to let young girls see how fun and useful computers can be, and then they’ll decide Computers Are For Girls.

From Our CEO: We'll give you the tools

In today’s male business culture, women need to carry a few more tools than men, but fortunately for women, this is not difficult.

— Nancy Clark