2010 holds a double anniversary for me. It’s my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the twenty-fifth year of the Working Mother 100 Best Companies. Talk about aligning my home and work worlds!

The beginnings of both were auspicious and groundbreaking. My fiancé, Bob Coulombe, planned our entire wedding, down to the chocolate cake with yellow sugar ribbons. He even found my dress, displayed on the wall of the Gallery of Wearable Art in New York City’s SoHo. Its large sequined flowers on satin panels gave my mom a bit of a shock, but what a dress!

Bob’s willingness to plan our wedding in his spare time while I focused on the success of Working Mother magazine foreshadowed the next 25 years. He moved his office into our home and became a pioneer work-from-home dad, while I pushed ahead in my career at every decision point.

The beginning of the Working Mother 100 Best Companies was telling as well. Our first editor-in-chief, Vivian Cadden, wanted to set up a competition among CEOs of large companies—a competition for the talent and loyalty of working moms. Some of the first winners had on-site child-care centers, offered paid maternity leave, allowed for flexible work hours and had women in upper management. When we named them the Working Mother 30 Best Companies, the news of a culture shift in American business wound up not only in the pages of our magazine but above the fold in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Growth Spurt
Over 25 years, both the list and my marriage grew and flourished. While Bob and I welcomed first Robert and then Julia Rose into the world, Working Mother expanded the list of Best Companies to 50, then 75 and finally the milestone of 100 Best Companies.

As my children grew, so did the Best Companies’ commitment to working-family employees. Companies added backup child care and summer camps for kids. Stress reduction programs became fully staffed medical centers and exercise facilities. An industry of employee assistance programs and work-life-balance professionals developed. Six weeks of partially paid maternity leave became six to 14 weeks at full pay, with prematernity leaves and new-mom phase-back.

And as the list grew, so did our 100 Best application. We discovered that companies sometimes offered limited access to benefits that we cared about. For example, a company might offer child care at headquarters but nothing to help moms in other locations. So we put questions in the survey asking how many employees had access to each of the benefits. Companies soon offered benefits equally across the country—providing vouchers or discounts for community child care, for example, when there were too few employees for an on-site center.

Then we learned that some companies had work-life benefits almost no one was using, and that moms often felt stigmatized if they did use them. So we started to measure ben e fit use. The companies themselves discovered that employee engagement and productivity increased only when the stigma of using the benefits was lifted, often by a manager’s buy-in.

We heard from our readers about the curse of the good boss/bad boss: A company’s working mothers were treated differently depending on who their supervisor was. The solution was to ask applicant companies if they were training all managers to properly handle work-life issues and promote formalized systems of benefits that everyone could clearly understand.

Of course, these and many other queries added to the task of filling out the 100 Best survey, which grew to more than 600 questions. We are so grateful to the human resource teams who have meticulously gathered the data, and who have so ably used our comparative benchmark to get policies changed, funding committed and culture shifted.

A Sea Change
Above all, the big result of the 100 Best has been to help the country as a whole think differently about working mothers. Women had been afraid to acknowledge, much less celebrate, their motherhood at work—we felt we might be “mommy tracked” if we talked about our kids. The positive media attention generated by the 100 Best, along with companies’ efforts to earn and keep a place on our list, created a new level of awareness about the needs of working moms. People want to have families, but it’s women who give birth, breastfeed and feel the primal sense of parental responsibility. Understanding and honoring the needs of mothers has been the work of the companies who find a place on this list.

In addition, the Best Companies have found that other employee groups also benefit from efforts to help working moms. Dads use paternity leave and flex to be closer to their kids. Marathon runners, people with aging parents and students, among others, use the range of family-friendly benefits for their own pursuits and needs. But we should never forget that working moms can function equally as well as men and childless women when we acknowledge that becoming and being a mother are unique life experiences.

The Long View
There is so much more to come in the next 25 years. We really need 1,000 companies to join our list, because the difference between the Best Companies and the rest of the country is dramatic . We also need Congress to legislate paid parental leave and sick days so we can begin to catch up to the rest of the world. We’re still one of only four countries that have no mandated paid maternity leave.

Companies will continue to innovate: With women now making up more than 50 percent of the workforce, and 70 percent of moms working, they will need our talent and commitment.

As I write this, Bob is planning our anniversary celebration. Of course, our party with family, friends and neighbors in the backyard won’t be quite as big as the one for the 100 Best twenty-fifth, when more than 1,000 people will celebrate at our gala dinner. I think I’ll go into the attic and find the double-wedding-ring quilt my mom and dad gave us for our wedding present. My mom sewed that king-size quilt secretly in the basement, and it was on our bed for about 15 years.

The double-wedding-ring quilt symbolizes two people’s lives entwined forever. But it’s also an excellent symbol of the intertwined commitment to family and career, to motherhood and ambition, that has grown in this country over the past 25 years. It is an image of the strength of a new way for couples to live, for women to find the warmth of a family and the challenge of a career, for families to find financial freedom and for companies to find and support talent from all sources.

Happy double twenty-fifth anniversary to Bob and to the Working Mother 100 Best Companies!