Section 2 General Methodological Overview

2.1 Overall Methodology

The Community Survey of Women in the Workplace was released and available for women in Forsyth County, North Carolina to complete from mid-September 2022 till the end of December 2022.

2.1.1 Survey Design and Distribution

The Community Survey of Women in the Workplace was developed by volunteers from REACH Women’s Network with counsel from strategic marketing firm Girl on the Roof and nonprofit research organization Forsyth Futures. Where possible, survey questions were benchmarked against other studies conducted locally (Women’s Fund of Winston-Salem) and nationally (including but not limited to McKinsey & Company and Deloitte). The purpose of the benchmarking was to allow for the comparison of women’s challenges and opinions in Winston-Salem to those of women nationally. Since REACH Women’s Network hopes to repeat the survey in the future, survey questions were designed to allow for tracking of improvement over time on key metrics associated with job and career satisfaction, home life, burnout, community involvement, and more.

The Community Survey of Women in the Workplace was designed for ALL working women who live and/or work in Winston-Salem / Forsyth County, North Carolina. Distribution efforts were aimed at securing responses from women representing diversity in age, race/ethnicity, industry, profession, career level, income level, and more. A link to the survey was emailed directly to REACH members and more than 1,500 other women (including attendees of past REACH Women’s Conferences). Each recipient was asked to complete the survey and share the link with other women. REACH also sent the survey link and objectives to partnering organizations and employers, with a request that they share it with women in their organizations. The Winston-Salem Journal and WFDD Public Radio published stories about the survey when it launched. Additionally, REACH promoted the survey through paid advertising on social media channels.

2.1.2 Response Rates

After data collection concluded at the end of December 2022, REACH Women’s Network shared access to the survey results with the research team at Forsyth Futures to begin analyzing the data. Only women living and/or working in Forsyth County, North Carolina were eligible to take the survey. This resulted in a final sample size of 687 with a 68% survey completion rate. The average amount of time it took respondents to complete the survey was 13 minutes.

2.2 Analysis Overview

The Community Survey of Women in the Workplace’s survey results were exclusively analyzed by Forsyth Futures’ staff members. The survey results presented below through visualizations and tables display the outcomes of the respondents’ answers. To complement the visualizations and tables, key findings are regularly discussed in each respective sub-section to highlight notable differences and observations found by Forsyth Futures’ staff members. Survey questions that referenced or were partially based on studies published by McKinsey & Company and Deloitte, among others, are noted in the key findings for comparison.

All non-qualitative questions asked in the survey are presented in this report, but some of the response options were collapsed or recoded during data cleaning. For questions that allowed respondents to enter their responses if theirs was not listed, analysts matched open-ended answers with existing categories or created new categories when appropriate. For more information on the steps taken during data cleaning, please refer to Data Cleaning in the Appendix. The data visualizations presented in the main report display the cleaned and recoded data instead of the raw or unformatted data. The raw data is presented at the end of the report in the Appendix.

The report itself is broken into nine sections starting with the Introduction and ending with the Appendix. The next section is Section 3 which presents the top key findings or observations from the report as a whole. Section 4 presents the demographic distribution of the data. Sections 5 through 8 present the findings across four broadly defined categories of respondents’ current work status, satisfaction with various aspects of their workplace, their home-life balance, and perceptions about the community.

2.2.1 Data Visualizations

Data visualizations are provided throughout the report to display the results of survey questions. Visualizations are a mix of interactive pie and bar plots, and static stacked bar and Likert-type plots. For the interactive visualizations, please hover the mouse over the wedge or bar to see the percentages. Data visualizations presented in this report exclude respondents who did not answer the question (e.g., were missing), except when noted in specific visualizations. Please refer to the Appendix for the full distribution of counts and percentages by survey question.

As a note about visualizations with Likert-type responses (e.g., strongly agree, agree, neither disagree nor agree, etc.), survey questions with five Likert-response options are displayed so that the negative (e.g., strongly disagree and disagree) and positive (e.g., strongly agree and agree) response option proportions are summed and reported together.