A recent New York Times headline—“Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”—sparked a firestorm across social media. Alison Moore, CEO of Chief, the prestigious network for senior women executives, is pushing back on this notion with data and nuance. Drawing from an exclusive nationwide survey of women leaders, Moore unpacks how evolving career paths are being misread, the impact of market disruption, and why women-centered spaces remain vital.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
The environment that you’ve come into with the Trump White House is kind of heightened; discussions about diversity are heated. The term DEI has become kind of a negative. How do you frame what Chief is about in this kind of climate?
There’s certainly more scrutiny on things today, perhaps than there were in the past. But I think at the end of the day, there’s a desire for creating better and stronger leaders, better outcomes, better decision-making, more agile thinking. While there are different contexts being held and conversations being held around DEI and the nuances of that, the truth is, when you cut through the big headlines, the realities remain the same—that supporting leadership at a time of high velocity of change is always beneficial. And we happen to build that in a way that supports women leaders, and I think there’s a lot of support for that.
Chief recently published a report, in partnership with Harris, surveying over a thousand senior-level women. And it pointed to a sort of changing definition of maybe ambition and success—a shift away from playing it safe toward bolder career moves—which was, in some ways, more optimistic and more empowering than I’d expected.
There had been a slew of articles that had come out focusing on changes in the workforce and finding the negative nugget in there to kind of put that on blast. And I’m not denying that there aren’t those factors at hand, but the she-cession is coming: Women are being dumped out of the workforce. The return to office doesn’t work for all women in the polarity that we’re in today, of big headlines being the only definition. We lose all nuance.
And so for us here, I come in February and I’m looking at this incredibly energetic Chief membership and thinking: This is what I’m seeing. I’m seeing people reacting and responding to change in ways that are innovative and curious and thought-provoking—this level of optimism that’s sitting in Chief—that they’re communicating together.” This is not just Chief telling women to be optimistic, this is the energy that you’re feeling from conversations.
And so the genesis of this poll was: How do we validate that? And so in the women that we surveyed, they’re citing that they’re more ambitious now than ever. And in fact, they’re energized by the professional growth ahead because they feel like they can have more optionality and more of a hand on the wheel of their own career design than what they used to have. This is where that metaphor of the ladder, and the “stay rung to rung to rung” and “keep the course and stay the path,” and “then something happens at the top.” Everyone can see that’s not necessarily the case anymore.
How much of the boldness do you think might be economy-driven? I noticed that over 80% of the executives cited market disruption as a motivator. It’s almost like disruption is, I don’t know, forcing action?
I think the economy is certainly always going to be a factor, but it’s also, like, let’s look at industry consolidation. You can look at what’s happening in the media business, you can look at what’s happening across retail. You can look at what’s happening in every vector and AI, which has a throughline all the way across all of these industries, and a common thread of this duality of opportunity and threat of change.
Is that “rung” as a metaphor again, for just career direction, not necessarily the “corporate ladder” as much as it is just the “up a ladder”? Is that the right path for me? Do I want other options? Do I want different kinds of flexibility? Do I have the sort of tools at my fingertips to actually do that? And that is what happens at Chief. And that’s what’s been very interesting for me to see and come back, actually, from a founding membership in 2019 to where we are today.
Women are building, scheming, meaning that business is scheming, partnering, collaborating differently now. I think the lid’s off on a lot of that stuff for women. And so you do feel the optimism coming out in this survey, even though I think there’s a pragmatism and recognizing it is coming from disruption. But disruption does bring opportunity.
So much of Chief is built around in-person connection and community. But in person, it’s so hard to scale. And I know when I was talking to your predecessor, Carolyn, she talked about the potential to have a LinkedIn-like product and a MasterClass-like product and a dating-app-like product. How do you think about today’s digital tools for community versus the IRL experiences? Where do you balance those things?
What I think about Chief today, and I think that was a very accurate description that Carolyn gave when that started. I think we’ve morphed into this space where there are a couple of different components. There are intimate experiences. By that, I mean small-space experiences where you talk and see and share about leadership challenges that can be in a virtual experience, very rewarding. But in certain places and markets, we can make that happen in real life.
It doesn’t have to be either-or, coaching, one-to-one coaching, so that happens on a virtual piece sometimes, that can be very rewarding, but if I’m going to have a cocktail party around other senior marketers, that should be at the clubhouse in real life. I’m about to go to LA this week for my eighth and then San Francisco in two weeks for the ninth. Nine ChiefXs this year, and this is where nine locations across the country, we’ve had members come, and it’s in real life, and they’re like rallies, and I get so much energy out of these things.
It’s unbelievable. We have some speakers, some programming, but it’s really about this kind of connecting energy between Chiefs with other Chiefs, big corporate people talking to founders of small things, folks who are in transition, all senior leaders in various parts of their journey, and these large rallies are definitely IRL and then peppered between that are the right size virtual experiences.
My next tranche of focus is really on the digital experience, the Chief app, the Chief digital experience in terms of, how do we make that as best of a member companion? The networking piece, the connections piece, whether that was the LinkedIn analogy that Carolyn meant, that’s where that really comes to life, but it comes to life in service of a lot of in real life experiences across multiple use types.
Many of the things that a woman leader is interested in are things that any leader is interested in. It doesn’t have to connect to the fact that it’s a woman, and then there are a tranche of things that may be more applicable to women than to men, although you could argue they’re applicable to everyone. I always struggled with this when we mentioned you being in Fast Company.
It was for a package we did on the most creative people in business and there were men and women on it, and we didn’t do a “most powerful women in business” like Fortune did. But there is something different when women get together without men there that maybe as a man I don’t quite appreciate or I want to, but I don’t really know.
Listen, I think for women in leadership roles, there is a place and a time for being together and learning from each other that’s just different. It’s additive. The conversations are because a woman’s career journey is tied to that 360 view of who they are in life, it just makes those conversations different, but not necessarily better. I’ve been in multiple coworking environments where it’s male, female, that’s all great too. I’m a big believer in the both—I really am.