women-in-leadership
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The Recruiter Who Went Rogue for Women in the C-Suite
Tracy Saunders spent two decades placing executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco. Then she flipped the model - and built a discreet network that gets senior women hired, paid and promoted without the noise.
Title Nine
Title Nine is a women-owned outdoor and active apparel brand founded in 1989 by Missy Park and named after the Title IX law that opened school sports to women. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, it designs and sells sports bras, activewear, swimwear, and outdoor clothing built specifically for women's bodies. What began as a Bay Area mail-order catalog has grown into an estimated $100M direct-to-consumer and retail business - the largest independently owned retailer of women's fitness clothing - staffed overwhelmingly by women athletes and led by an all-women executive team. Alongside apparel, Title Nine has invested heavily in female entrepreneurs through its annual Pitchfest competitions.
Athena Alliance
Athena Alliance is a subscription community and learning platform that helps senior women executives build what it calls a 'Portfolio of Impact' - advancing into the C-suite, onto corporate boards, and into investing, entrepreneurship, and thought leadership. Founded in 2016 by Coco Brown, it blends a curated peer network, a learning library, 1:1 coaching, live salons, and direct board-opportunity matching. Its membership spans leaders from companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Disney, Databricks, and Stripe, and the organization says it has helped place hundreds of women on corporate boards.
Chief
Chief is a private membership network built for senior women executives - VPs, C-suite leaders, and the rungs just below. It pairs members into facilitated peer 'Core' groups led by executive coaches, layers on workshops, curated events, and physical clubhouses in major U.S. cities, and aims to close the gap at the top of the corporate ladder by giving women the kind of back-channel network that has long been reserved for men. Founded in 2019, Chief became one of the fastest female-founded U.S. companies to reach a $1 billion valuation.