By Karen Gullo
Art by Kseniya Makarova for Seismic Sisters
Author and women’s activist Tiffany Dufu had her own “crew” of peers, a group of women who gave support and advice, and tapped their networks to help her and each other in their professional and personal endeavors. She knew other women wanted crews of their own but, with busy lives, didn’t have the time to network, attend events to find the right people, forge connections, and organize meetings. Dufu saw a business opportunity to raise up women. In 2018 she launched the social networking platform The Cru, which today has matched hundreds of women with their own crew of professional women with whom they collaborate to meet goals, whether it’s getting a promotion, starting a fitness routine, or finishing a personal project.
Tech entrepreneur and startup founder Gina Pell was looking for a new venture after selling her style guide website Splendora in 2011. Pell, a San Francisco native, and business partner Amy Parker, both of whom began creating online communities years before social media networks were a thing, wanted to offer intelligent, edgy, and interesting online content for women. The result was The What List, a weekly email newsletter about their recommendations for everything from books to skincare products. Pell and Parker’s musings tapped into a need among readers for connection and community, and grew into a private women’s online community called The What Women. Today, over 35,000 members in seven cities share stories, exchange ideas, seek advice, and offer support and friendship on a daily basis. Pell and Parker just launched The What Alliance to connect female-focused brands to What List members.
Gina Pell, The What List co-founder
These are just a few examples of a new kind of social media: women-founded social networks aimed specifically at women. They aim to create safe spaces where members can make friends, share stories, network, talk shop, or seek advice about work issues that they don’t feel comfortable talking about with co-workers. Like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, these social networks are a way of connecting online, but the similarities pretty much end there. Most don’t run ads; some are free or charge monthly or annual fees (from $10 a month to $10,000 a year). They are more private, personal, and conversational than the typical social network. A turning point for The What Women was when Pell and Parker posed a question to members: aside from sex, how do you derive pleasure? “By the end of the day we had 1,000 new members,” Pell said. “Women are eager for conversation.”
Jana Messerschmidt, partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Lightspeed Ventures and co-founder of #ANGELS
Female networks are more about community and less about selfies, more about supporting women than tearing people down, say founders. They don’t allow fights over politics, trolling, or computer-generated algorithms that spoon-feed content to users and control what they see on their feed. Because most are exclusively for women, members don’t have to worry that their male colleagues, HR director, or boss are reading their posts.
On traditional ad-supported platforms, with influencers, product placements, troll wars, and an emphasis on persona-building, “there’s so much noise, it’s never ending,” said Naj Austin, founder of Ethel’s Club and Somewhere Good, social media sites for people of color. “It’s a constant deluge of stuff, and we all feel the need to be around it, to be in the loop,” but to what end? It “creates a very weird sense of self,” said Austin. “You become kind of a character. Women feel like they can’t be themselves.”
Tiffany Dufu, The Cru founder
Mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, with global reach and billions of users, will continue to dominate social networking for the foreseeable future. But with women looking for networks that foster more meaningful connections, social media startups catering to the female perspective have started cropping up all over the place in the last few years. It’s a growing market that should be a wake-up call for social media entrepreneurs and investors.
“It’s all about the programming of content,” said Jana Messerschmidt, partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Lightspeed Ventures and co-founder of #ANGELS, a woman-founded investment collective that provides capital for start-ups founded by women and people of color. “Being on broad mainstream social media networks is not always a soothing experience.” This has driven people to find new vertical platforms with strong sub-communities—Messerschmidt points to apps like Discord for gamers, Loupe for sports trading cards, and Locker Room for sport’s fans as examples of tight knit communities with well programmed content.
In researching this article, we found over 20 platforms for women, and heard about many more being launched or in the works. The platforms are mostly vertical and cater to specific groups: there are networks for working mothers, job seekers, women reentering the workforce, women of color, black women in tech, female engineers, senior executive women, empty-nesters, female entrepreneurs, mothers with small children, women over 50, and much more. They all have a few things in common: strict rules against bullying, bad-mouthing, and put downs. Trolls get the boot. Bringing your authentic self, being supportive and honest, offering help, sharing your experiences, or just listening are what’s required.
Sarah Lacy, Chairman Mom founder
Former tech journalist, author, and entrepreneur Sarah Lacy launched Chairman Mom, a subscription-based ($10 a month) platform for working moms, in 2018 as a place where badass women can get advice about parenting, workplace issues, and everything in between. “I found so much power in being a mother, but never felt comfortable in any online mothers’ group,” said Lacy, a San Francisco resident who has two elementary school-aged children. She wanted a group that was supportive and helpful, not classist or homogenized. A site that celebrates working mothers. “I really needed to build something for women like me,” she said.
Like other founders interviewed for this story, Lacy set out to raise money to start her business, no easy feat for women. The venture capital industry has a massive gender disparity problem. Only 11 percent of VC partners in the U.S. are women. Less than 3 percent of venture capital money invested in startups goes to female founders (yes, you read that right). If your startup’s customers are female, the odds of getting funded shrink significantly, Lacy says. Male VCs who might write a check for a female-founded startup aimed at working women would probably do so based on their perceptions about working women, which is probably way different from the founder’s. “We are not trying to sell anything,” Lacy jokes. “We’re trying to overthrow the patriarchy.”
Naj Austin, Ethel’s Club founder
She initially raised $1.4 million and had an all-women team of developers build software for the platform, where members are invited to respond to two or three curated questions (from members) posted each day. Questions range from how do I ask for a raise to how do I ask if there are guns in the home before letting my child do a playdate at a friend’s home. Lacy says Chairman Mom has thousands of members—most are women but no one is excluded, so there are some men and nonworking women on the platform. Members can join weekly free Zoom group sessions with experts leading discussions about work and parenting issues, or book a one-on-one call for advice with other Chairman Mom members who are career coaches, entrepreneurs, or parenting experts. Lacy raised a total of $3 million since launching, and recently started the Sisterhood Project, a 6-month fee-based virtual course on building community that’s open to Chairman Mom members and nonmembers.
Some female social network startups launched as shared work spaces or private clubs, and had to pivot and go digital because of the pandemic. COVID-19 devastated the economy, and women have lost the most jobs during the pandemic. More than 22 million jobs were lost in spring 2020 when the pandemic began; a little over half have returned. But as of November, women held 5.3 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic, compared to 4.6 million for men. In December alone, women accounted for 100 percent of the 140,000 jobs lost in the U.S., according to the National Women’s Law Center. Women founders of social network platforms report seeing a surge in membership and engagement since the pandemic, as women seek support and connection in online spaces.
Seismic Sisters went in search of creative social media networks founded by women and these rising stars grabbed our attention!
Brooklyn-based Ethel’s Club, a 4,700 square foot social club for people of color with a boutique, kitchen, yoga studio, café, and open meeting space launched in 2019, was thriving with 250 members and thousands on a waiting list when the novel coronavirus ended in-person group gatherings. The physical club shut down. Austin, 29, who had raised $1 million through crowdsourcing and funding from author Roxane Gay and others, knew she had to pivot. She believed that, with workers losing jobs, suffering financial hardship, and experiencing illness and isolation, it was imperative for people of color to have a space to gather and support each other without the harassment and racism they experience on mainstream platforms. Ethel’s Club, named in honor of Austin’s grandmother Ethel Lucas, the matriarch in a tight-knit Black community whose home and kitchen were gathering places, went digital in the spring of 2020 and introduced a $17 monthly subscription (membership fees had been $65 or $195 a month depending on features) that includes thrice-weekly events featuring Black and Brown wellness professionals, caregivers, writers, artists, therapists, teachers, and more. Conversations about systemic racism and police brutality that dominated headlines following George Floyd’s death brought many to the platform, which has a national membership of over 1,000. The majority are millennials, but Gen Zs and a 50+ crowd are also on the platform.
“We have been able to be in the right place at the right time,” said Austin.
She also launched the site Somewhere Good, an offshoot of Ethel’s Club that connects people of color based on their interests and identities. You’re invited into small groups (Austin says it’s like being invited to a very intimate dinner party) and the platform creates a timeline and newsfeed that’s curated from the select communities you decided to join.
The platform has a strict, zero tolerance policy against discrimination and harassment, and limits users’ ability to post on someone’s feed. Members are allowed to follow others only after they’ve had multiple interactions. “This makes it more real,” said Austin. You wouldn’t follow someone around in real life after meeting them once; the policy encourages people to get to know one another.
Somewhere Good also connects members to black-owned businesses and services, from skincare and clothing to podcasts and galleries. The rest of the Internet was not built with people of color in mind, but this platform is, Austin said. “There’s a new urgency to have every aspect of your life reflect your ID,” she said.
Mai Ton, tech industry HR executive
New Yorker Mai Ton has been a senior human resources executive in the tech industry for a decade, and is used to being the only woman, and minority, in a room full of white men. She joined Chief, a social club and network for high-level executive women, for one simple reason. “I got tired of never being among women and only being around men,” she said.
Chief, founded by Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, both former senior level executives at e-commerce companies, launched in 2019 with the opening of a private club in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. With a mission to connect and support senior women leaders, Chief filled a void and took off, garnering more than 2,000 members from top U.S. corporations, with several thousand more on a wait list. Only executive women or rising vice presidents can apply to join (or be nominated by existing members). Childers and Kaplan have raised $40 million in venture funding. Membership costs $10,000 a year (members’ employers often pay the fee).
When the pandemic hit, Chief shifted to all online services and events—monthly peer group meetups, leadership workshops, presentations by industry icons, and one-on-one coaching. Members can chat on a community platform with over 40 channels on topics like diversity and women in tech.
“I’ve gained a lot of connections and comradery that I wouldn’t have otherwise,” said Ton, chief people officer at Kickstarter. “Members are very seasoned women who have made it in their careers and want to help others.” Chief pairs members with a core group of about eight people, led by a professionally-trained coordinator, who meet monthly to discuss work issues and get feedback and advice. Ton said she worked with a coach who helped her get “unstuck” on an issue, and garnered four new clients, whom she met on Chief, for her consulting business. “This is your tribe. It’s like having a small group of advisors,” she said. “We utilize and help each other.”
Alexandria Noel Butler, Sista Circle founder.
While working as a project manager at Airbnb, Alexandria Noel Butler was grappling with how to be more direct with co-workers after receiving feedback from a good friend, who happened to be a white male colleague, about her management style. His advice was: don’t mince words, just be direct and don’t worry that people may not like it. “I said, I can’t do that,” Butler remembers. “I’m a dark-skinned, curly-haired Black women, and I can’t walk into a room and talk to people the way he talks to people.” She had to figure out her own way of being direct, as a Black woman working at a mostly white male company. What she wanted was advice and feedback from other Black women managers. But this is Silicon Valley, which employs very few people of color. A recent study from San Jose State University revealed that ten large tech companies in the valley had no Black women employees (the report didn’t name the companies).
“I had to find someone who looks like me and shares my experience,” said Butler, senior program manager for data and privacy at Twitter. So, in 2017 she started a Facebook group called Sista Circle: Black Women In Tech. It started with a few of her friends who also invited their friends. Butler’s goal was to create a safe space online where Black women in tech can make connections and network, but also discuss the challenges and struggles of being a woman of color in Silicon Valley. Now, almost four years since it launched, Sista Circle has 7,700 members from around the world. It’s a sounding board and gathering place for Black women in tech, with discussions about work, life, relationships, kids, you name it, says Butler, now a senior program manager at Twitter and speaker and advocate for women in tech.
“Sista Circle helped me be more honest and helped me figure out how to have difficult conversations,” she said. “It’s given me permission to be myself. That’s what I hope this community gives other people.”
Karen Gullo is a freelance writer and former Associated Press and Bloomberg News reporter covering technology, law, and public policy. She is currently an analyst and senior media relations specialist at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco.
*This list of networks, organizations or social media platforms (the “Platforms”) is for entertainment, education and reference purposes only. Seismic Sisters and the author do not guarantee or endorse the Platforms. Seismic Sisters is in no way affiliated or “materially connected” with the Platforms. Seismic Sisters has no responsibility for any of the Platforms’ operations and services or influence over any of the Platforms’ independent content and public commentary. Use the Platforms at your own risk.
