By Lauren Young

 

BusinessWeek just came out with its annual list of the Best Places to Launch A Career, ranking 119 employers on areas such as pay, benefits, and training programs.

 

To find out whether these companies are also family friendly, I compared BusinessWeek’s list to Working Mother Magazine’s annual list of the best 100 companies for working moms. I realize that the focus is on mothers, but aside from lactation rooms and women’s networks, the majority of perks available to working moms, such as back-up daycare and flexible schedules, are available to working dads, too. As for parental leave, many companies offer paid time off to moms as well as dads. Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG are the best companies to start your career and stick around once you have a family. These three companies, which hail from the accounting realm, rank in the top 10 of both lists.

 

Overall, 35 companies overlap on the two lists, which I spent about an hour combing through so I may have missed one or two companies. To be fair, it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison: BusinessWeek’s ranking incorporates government agencies such as the IRS, while the Working Mother list does not. BusinessWeek’s survey also includes service-oriented jobs for those young idealists who want to make the world a better place such as AmeriCorps and Teach for America.

 

The other companies that overlap:

Deloitte

Goldman Sachs

Marriott International

IBM

J.P. Morgan

Microsoft

Abbott Labs

Merrill Lynch

Verizon Communications

General Mills

Lehman Brothers

Cisco Systems

Intel

Wachovia

Citigroup

Accenture

Kraft Foods

Met Life

Prudential

Blue Cross Blue Shield

Eli Lilly

Grant Thornton

Merck

Booz Allen

Allstate

Hewlett Packard

UBS

Credit Suisse

PNC

McGladery & Pullen