In the actual engineering group it's certainly less, but if you look across the team that sits at the strategic planning table for Goodway, we have 13 leaders, seven of them are women,” said Friedman.

“With engineering itself – fingers on keyboard coding – we have four out of 20, which is still high. That flexibility allows Goodway, an 86-year-old, family-owned company, to hire the best people, regardless of gender, and that includes the usually male-dominated engineering staff. Lindy Jones, Goodway VP media operations, who is based in Waco, points to the ability to “move back ‘home’ to the country which fits my pace of life” as a critical positive point that has allowed her to have the flexibility of working remotely that has “increased my quality of life which, in turn, allows me to be more productive at work.”

“I think that certainly the distributed nature of our company lends itself to women,” said Friedman, giving one explanation. In fact, a vast majority of the team members are in places like Waco, Texas Melrose, Wisconsin and North Kingstown, Rhode Island. In Goodway Group’s case, the 400-strong workforce is distributed throughout the United States, and not necessarily in the bubbles of Silicon Valley or New York City. Less women-friendly practices, especially around flexibility in the workplace, could potentially be one key issue. The bro culture and issues related to the hiring pipeline and retention of women are just a few of the issues that contribute to the logjam. For Jay Friedman, chief operating officer of Goodway Group, a Philadelphia-based company focused on programmatic media, SEM and advertising performance, it just kind of happened that way, which makes it even more of a rarity on the ad tech world.

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