Why the C.E.O. Behind Match.com and Tinder Took a Stand on the Texas Abortion Law
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Jennifer McLá now is the chief executive and co-founder of Match.com, where nearly 30 million users around the world rely on her for dating, finding jobs, and other personal relationships.
A graduate of Stanford Business School, McLá left the industry in 2012, to start a company that would revolutionize how people meet. She worked with investors, partners and entrepreneurs to help bring Tinder to the web, and was responsible for the company’s most recent expansion.
This summer McLá took on a new challenge in an industry where she saw an opportunity–and an opportunity to make change. Her company Match.com was about to launch, and McLá thought it would be a good time to take a stand on the issue of abortion in the United States.
“I personally believe in this pro-life side of our platform, and so I decided to start talking about it and to ask people in the space why they do what they do,” McLá told Business Insider. She explained to her employees that the pro-life community needed to take a stand against the Texas “heartbeat bill” that would ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy in the state. The bill passed in May, but was then blocked in the state’s lower courts and suspended by the Texas Supreme Court before taking effect. McLá was disappointed, and even more so when her company’s chief competitor, Tinder, backed a similar bill that would have banned nearly all abortions in Texas.
McLá didn’t join the board of match.com’s parent company, Match Group, when she took the job in 2012, but she did become an investor and board director. Before Match Group would sell the company to Vertex, a French company that owns dating websites like OkCupid and Tinder, she was named C.E.O. And when the company began selling, McLá brought her pro
