Carol Evan's CEO of Diversity Best Practices- Published October 2010

     Carol Evans, CEO of Diversity Best Practices and President of Working Mother Media was on campus October 1st at 4:30pm in Pierce Hall to present about the balances between being a working woman and mother.
        Carol Evans, the award-winning author of This is How We Do It: The Working Mother’s Manifesto, has won numerous awards, most recently the Admiral Grace Hopper Women’s Diversity Champion Award from the U.S Navy.  Evans founded Working Mother Media in August 2001 after acquiring Working Mother Magazine and the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), becoming the first mom to own Working Mother.
        Working Mother Magazine was first launched in 1978 where for the first 10 years Evans worked as a single woman as the advertising director and VP publisher. From 1989 to 2001, Evans took some time away from the magazine and ran two publishing companies however; in late 2001 Evans came back and bought the company. Evans bought the magazine just three weeks before 9/11, “My story for working mother is one of timing, We had lost 5 million dollars before we had really opened our door,” said Evans regarding the hard times she had with Working Mother during the last couple months in 2001 into 2002.
        Being a working mother is a very hard task today, 70% of mother’s work outside the home, 40% of breadwinners are moms and 32 million moms are working in the country today. Women are responsible for 85% of the sales in this country across the boards. Woman may work for money like men do but mothers have a higher concern for money in regards to supporting the family, most importantly their children. “The future for a mother resides not in herself, but in that of her children,” said Evans.
       Working Mother Magazine was created to help support mothers nationwide; to help them better balance work and family. “We all either are moms or have moms. Moms are a special breed of women who want and need support, but get so little,” said Evans. The magazine has been in circulations for 31 years and since the 70s they have always received letters to the editor saying the same thing, “Thank you so much for being there. I don’t feel so alone.” Working mothers always feel so guilty because they can’t be at home with their children, Working Mother is there to help mothers balance work and balance family so that mom and their children do not feel deprived of each other.
     Evans stresses the issue of being straightforward with your wants and needs. It is very important to lay the need on the line if you need it. “We are so busy imagining a response that we don’t ever get to asking for help,” said Evans.
     Evans came to speak with Franklin Pierce University because her daughter is a student here and she enjoys talking to young people.
      “The millennial, I think are a cool and great generation and people don’t see that unless they are in contact with them. I just love this generation because it is a very strong one and its going to be a very good pipeline for careers because you guys know that you can’t be lazy and this is making a very focused generation out of the millennial,” said Evans.
        Evans, a proud wife and mother of two is a graduate of Empire State College/SUNY and her involvement with Working Mother dates back to 1978, when she played a critical role in the launch of the magazine. In 1986 she founded the working Mother 100 Best Companies, which is still the most important workplace benchmark in the country.