Is empowering corporate women enough?
For admission to Chief, a women’s leadership network, members pay up to $7,900. That gets them executive coaching, bigname speaker sessions, a Rolodex of female executives and, for an extra cost, access to five sleek clubhouses. Chief is essentially an “old boys’ club” — for the ladies. The venture capital-backed company has grown to more than 20,000 members and more than $1 billion in value since it started in 2019.
This month, in social media battles, some of its members have begun to ask: What does their club of high-powered women stand for? On LinkedIn, some Chief members have criticized the community’s approach to racial diversity and its response to political issues like the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and some have announced plans to quit.
Chief ’s founders, Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers, said they’ve donated to abortion access groups, issued statements in the wake of racial violence and acted on their members’ feedback while remaining focused on the company’s primary goal, which is women’s corporate advancement. But in conversations with two dozen current and former Chief members, some said they wanted the network to be more socially and politically engaged.
“The price tag is really too high for people to not care deeply about how they’re responding to these significant issues,” said Nika White, 47, the president of a diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy who decided not to renew her Chief membership this month.
Other members defended the organization, like Amani Duncan, formerly a senior vice president at ViacomCBS. “I was shocked when I started seeing the posts on LinkedIn,” Duncan, 52, said. “I didn’t realize how much I needed Chief until I joined. It was kind of kismet.”
It’s a she-said, she-said story. But it’s one that raises a thorny and longsimmering question: Is amassing power for corporate women a worthy goal in itself ? Or should female executives, as they ascend, prioritize spotlighting the many social and economic issues holding back more marginalized women?
The recent turmoil at Chief began on International Women’s Day, in early March, when a member of the network, Denise Conroy, declared on LinkedIn that she was leaving Chief and accused the group of sidestepping political issues and ghosting women of color who applied for membership. (Conroy, 51, later acknowledged that she had been reprimanded internally for trying to sell tickets on Chief ’s platform to an external workshop she was running, which ran counter to the company’s policies.) Her post, which generated more than
5,000 reactions, incited larger debate within Chief about the community’s future.
Rachel Hassall, a supply chain executive, is one of the Chief members who chose to leave the organization this month. She had recently participated in a discussion that Conroy hosted about the book “White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better,” where some Chief members shared frustrations with the organization’s approach to racial inclusivity. Hassall started to feel ashamed about her membership.
“I did not join thinking this was a political or social revolution,” said Hassall, 37. “But when I got in and realized how much power is in there, then I was like, ‘Why aren’t we doing more?’”
Chief ’s founders told The New York Times that their mission was advancing women’s leadership in business, not social advocacy. They also pointed to the statements Chief released to the community after the killing of George Floyd, the shootings targeting Asian Americans near Atlantaarea spas and other incidents of racial violence, as well as to donations it has made to racial justice nonprofits. Thirty-three percent of Chief ’s members are women of color. And the founders said the organization treated all applicants the same. It sends only acceptance emails, not rejections.
“At Chief, we have always wanted to make sure that our values were clear,” Childers said. “But we’re also not a social activism organization.”
Chief ’s annual membership costs $5,800 for vice presidents and $7,900 for C-suite executives; 70% of members have their fees covered by employers. Membership brings access to executive coaching, career workshops, in-person meetups, a job board and speaker sessions with high-profile women like Michelle Obama and Amal Clooney, as well as entry to chic clubhouses in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London for an additional cost. Women can apply or be nominated for membership, and for admission, Chief considers their titles as well as the size of their companies and the teams they manage.
“It was challenging to climb the corporate ladder as a first-generation immigrant,” said Gabby Hirata, 34, the CEO of Diane von Furstenberg. “Chief gave me the exposure to observe how the SVPs and C-levels carry themselves.”
But some of its members now argue that
Chief ’s group coaching is better suited to supporting the professional experiences of white women. Sibil Patri, 41, a vice president at an asset management company, recalled that when she was first accepted to Chief, she felt a high that she’d been chasing since adolescence when she was cut from the cheerleading team: the sense of being in the cool girls’ club.
It didn’t take long for her sense of belonging to dissipate. Sitting in group coaching sessions, she got the feeling that the white women couldn’t relate to the professional problems that the women of color were sharing. Last year, she quit. She emailed Chief then to say the network should have a “stronger curated experience for women of color.”
“Chief is a club for white women,” Patri said. “If you are a group built by white women to help white women without centering any of the other intersections, that’s fine, but you need to be willing to own that.”
“We have really tried to ensure that there’s no ‘onlys’ within those groups,” Childers said of Chief ’s coaching groups, adding that their guides are trained to facilitate difficult conversations. “There is a lot of training that we try to put in place; we’ve been doing inclusivity training specifically with them. But there’s more to do.”
The company said retention rates for women of color this year were 4 percentage points higher than for white women.
And some women of color in the community said they didn’t share the inclusivity critiques. Sandhya Jain-Patel joined the network in 2019. She enjoyed what members referred to as “Chief disease,” which was the zealous support the women gave one another for entrepreneurial ideas batted around at the clubhouses.
“Somebody would be like, ‘I want to do this,’ and everybody would be like, ‘Sure, I’ll help you,’” Jain-Patel, 48, recalled. “I remember saying to somebody one day, ‘I have this website idea. This is what I really want to do.’ She grabbed my phone, pulled up GoDaddy and was like, ‘I’ll register it right now.’”
Jain-Patel, though, does have her own frustrations with Chief. “Aside from this core group, what are you doing for us?” she said. “Why are you charging us so much money?”
When Chief ’s founders, Kaplan, 38, and Childers, 43, were building their own careers, access to an executive women’s network seemed like a resource worth paying for — not to mention coaching, which they pointed out can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Just over 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies are run by women.
Childers, who was previously a vice president at the company Handy, recalled fielding constant pleas for advice from young female colleagues earlier in her career. Kaplan had worked at a startup where she was the only senior woman, and had to help design her own maternity leave policy.
The two met in 2017 at a networking event in the basement of an Italian restaurant in New York City, and two years later, they started the executive women’s network. Initially, they thought they would accept members only near their clubhouses. But then the pandemic hit, much of their programming went virtual, and they decided to expand their reach.
The network exploded — its waiting list swelled to 60,000 — as did its valuation, propelling
Chief to become one of the fastest-growing femalefounded unicorns. Last year, Chief secured $100 million infunding.