Some industry areas are incredibly male dominated and have a “boys club” nature, as a young woman professional learning to navigate this has been the biggest con of my early career. There are a lot of women at KF especially in leadership, the boys club is really industry and region specific. That being said, they are really lacking in racial diversity within the workforce, frankly in my time there I’ve had very very rare interactions with other people of color internally which is unfortunate and not acknowledged. There also is a mentality that if you want to get promoted here you have to seek it out, meaning that you could be doing an incredible job but no one will ever just give you a promotion and I don’t love that. To move up from a Research Associate you essentially have to ask for more work and beg partners to let you do associate duties on their searches, and some aren’t prone to agreeing to this and/or simply don’t want to mentor you through that process so you’re left to ask around to figure out how to do things. It’s a great lesson in agency, but again hard to navigate especially when already facing a boys club mentality. A lot of overtime is required to do a good job, and if you aren’t working enough overtime people will tell you that you don’t have enough work to do. This was really misconstrued to me in interviews as I was told that this job would require minimal overtime work. Their insurance benefits are AWFUL, it’s Cigna.
