work somewhere else - Anonymous employee SHE-CAN Employee Review

CEO Annelise Bauer is making this workplace - and the world - a better place. Her presence for the past 2 years (first as COO and for the past year as CEO) shows how beautifully aligned her leadership is with all of SHE-CAN's communities that converge to support the SHE-CAN scholar journey through our program. Staff have been incredible to work with and are all passionate about supporting the mission - including challenging intentional or unintentional organizational systems or bad behavior towards our scholars. Turnover problem is hopefully bygone as we have a solid team in place, and growing! Improved hybrid policy and flexibility around time off. Improved professional development opportunities for staff. Improved office culture. Board support of Annelise seems to be there. Community that loves supporting the impact SHE-CAN scholars make. Also, no more food shaming. Office food is amazing. (Note - Glassdoor has the CEO listed as Barbara Bylenga - who has "retired" after over a decade. She was first Executive Director and then CEO at the end - from 2024 to 2025. Any reviews prior to March 2026 are related to her, not Annelise).

High turnover of incredible staff due to stress of previous leadership was challenging for both new and longterm staff. Sometimes there was nobody to train new staff. Also challenging is fundraising and partnerships to support women's leadership , especially women from outside the US, in this current political climate.

Noble mission, high achieving scholars and dedicated staff. Wonderful new CEO with heart, natural leadership, and intelligence.

The former CEO was removed due to creating a hostile work environment in the organization and targeting some staff with harassment. She was put into a Chief Philanthropy Officer role and prohibited from managing any staff due to her pervasive mistreatment and hostility toward her staff. She made huge mistakes in fiscal management pursuing pet projects with negative ROI. She created a toxic culture by mistreating the SHE-CAN staff at every level and did not allow people to do their jobs because of constant micromanagement, redoing everything and making it worse. She has a hard time understanding basic concepts, yet micromanages people like she's an expert. She is not and is firmly stuck in the 1990s. Barbara Bylenga is a poor leader who commands no respect because she grossly disrespected her staff, vendors and some scholars. She lacks vision, is unorganized, frenetic, does not understand fundraising or financials, while always being condescending and mean. She needs to be exited all the way out.