Pros
I'm a woman who worked at S-RM for 6 years. I started as an analyst and ended as a director, managing all S-RM's corporate intelligence client relationships in the US. Five stars for growth and learning opportunities. The work is enormously stressful, demanding, and fast-paced, but in exchange I developed highly marketable skills in investigations, team and client management, business development, and all basic aspects of finance, legal, compliance, HR, and marketing required to run and grow a multi-million-dollar business.
Cons
S-RM does not compensate senior women comparably to its men, and I left the company mainly because of this. For context, I was promoted five times in six years, and received excellent performance ratings in every review. My performance was not a limiting factor in my compensation. And yet: I took over management of S-RM's US intelligence clients from a man with a similar level of experience and responsibilities. I was paid 25% less. Over the next year, my work growing these client relationships resulted in doubling our US revenue. At my last performance review I asked for a 20% raise. I was given 14%. I resigned soon after. My role has been taken over by another man with a similar level of experience and responsibilities. He is, again, being paid over 25% more than what I was making by the time I left. There are significant seniority and wage gaps between men, and every other demographic, at S-RM. Its executive leadership, heads of every geographic region (Americas/EMEA/APAC), and heads of almost every practice area are almost exclusively white and male. The firm made steps toward transparency by providing some data to employees about salary bands for junior and mid-level roles. But as of the time I resigned, no salary transparency at senior levels was provided to directors. This leaves the women and minorities who do make it to a senior level with limited data to understand whether - and how substantially - they are being undercompensated for equal work.