What Industry Dominates the Working Mother Top 100 List?

Working Mother Magazine has published its annual Top 100 list of the best companies for working mothers to work for. See if you can detect an industry pattern in their Top 10:

1. Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
2. Eli Lilly and Company
3. General Mills
4. Hewlett Packard Company
5. IBM
6. JFK Medical Center
7. PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP
8. Prudential Financial
9. S.C. Johnson & Son
10. Schering-Plough Corporation

The top two, and three of the top ten, are in this one industry.

Other companies in this industry in the Top 100 include: Abbott Labs, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, and Wyeth.

Of course I’m referring to the pharmaceutical industry, which garnered 13 of the Top 100 slots.

Try to remember this the next time you hear politicians, “social activists,” and others rail at:
- “Greedy pharmaceutical companies“
- “Evil pharmaceutical companies“

Much more importantly, it should be noted that these frequently maligned companies have had more than a little influence on the reductions in death rates cited in this article, which opens with this: “The death rate from all causes of death combined decreased by 32 percent between 1970 and 2002, with the largest decreases for heart disease and stroke, but with an increase in death rates for diabetes and COPD, according to an article in the September 14 issue of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).”

But the self-appointed “activists” decry the fact that the pharmaceutical companies have made “obscene profits” (i.e., provided a good return to their shareholders) while providing all of these societal benefits. It apparently also doesn’t count that the companies have generally treated their employees pretty well.

The shortest route to flat-lining life expectancy (instead of seeing it by 2 years or so every 10 years, as has been the case during the past 50 years) would be to regulate this industry beyond its already over-regulated state.