Paid Women's Networks Rise as Corporate DEI Fades

The End of the Company-Sponsored Career Net

For much of the millennial working experience, the women’s employee resource group (ERG) functioned as a silent partner in career advancement. It was free, it was on-site, and it delivered two essential commodities: colleagues who could vouch for your work and intelligence that reached you before you formally needed it. These groups were the de facto professional infrastructure for a generation of women navigating the corporate ladder.

That era is closing. As corporate support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives has waned under the current administration, many companies have quietly reduced their backing for these internal networks. The void has been filled by a new model—one that requires a formal application, a long wait, and a membership fee.

A New Kind of Professional Network

Caitlyn Kumi is at the forefront of this shift. Her company, Miss EmpowHer, has launched Her Collective by Miss EmpowHer, a private membership network designed to replicate—and replace—the professional benefits that ERGs once provided. The demand has been striking: 3,000 individuals joined the waitlist before the first cohort was even seated in March. The next application window will not reopen until the end of the first quarter of 2027.

“We had 3,000 on the waitlist, and we still have women on that waitlist from our last round,” Kumi explained.

Kumi’s perspective is telling. At 26, she belongs to a different generation than the millennials who relied on employer-provided networks. She never worked in an environment where the company was the default supplier of professional connections. Her Collective’s membership, which skews between the ages of 25 and 40, captures a specific demographic: the cohort that spent a decade hearing that relationships were career insurance and is now choosing to purchase that policy independently.

The Perk That Left the Building

The erosion of employer-side support is measurable. The McKinsey & LeanIn Women in the Workplace 2025 report reveals that only 54% of companies now consider women’s advancement a high priority, with the figure dropping to 46% for women of color. Furthermore, nearly all women’s ERGs have been opened to all employees—a change that HR leaders in the study fear has diluted the focus on specific barriers these groups were originally designed to address.

The data on sponsorship and promotion remains starkly uneven:

• Only 31% of women report having a sponsor, compared to 45% of men.
• For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women make the same leap.
• That number falls to 74 for women of color.

Kumi hears the direct consequences of these statistics in the applications she reviews. “Some companies no longer have women’s ERGs, or maybe they were in a sorority or some other organization, and they knew that they needed to expand their network, but there was a gap,” she said.

The Remote Work Disconnect

Geography and work patterns have compounded the problem. A Microsoft study of 61,000 employees, published in Nature Human Behaviour, found that company-wide remote work made collaboration networks more static and siloed. The “bridging ties” that carry information between different groups became rarer. Five years into the widespread remote work experiment, the professionals who began their careers in that isolated environment are now the ones seeking out alternatives like Her Collective.

“Because what happens if you leave the org?” Kumi asked. “Not to say you completely lose the network, but it’s different when you’re working day to day, connecting with your coworkers, and a lot of people, that’s where the networking stops. It stops in college, or it stops early career. But you will need referrals when you go for jobs and opportunities. You will need a network outside of just your immediate company.”

The shift is clear: for a growing number of professional women, the safety net once provided by the employer is now a personal investment, purchased with time, money, and intention.

Vetted For Reciprocity

The selection criteria are the most interesting thing about Her Collective by MissEmpowHer’s, and the least discussed part of the paid-community model. Kumi’s team screens for what a candidate has already given away.

“One thing that was really important as we built this community is not women who just want to get from the community, but also give,” she said. The proof points she looks for are unglamorous and specific: referring women in your network for jobs, hosting a local meetup, posting a recap of an event you were not paid to promote. When Kumi recruited an advisory board, more than 200 people applied. She screened out the ones treating it as a line on a resume.

That is a deliberate correction to how the category has behaved. Chief, the executive women’s network that charged $5,800 a year and carried a 60,000-person waitlist at a $1 billion valuation, cut staff in a 2023 restructuring after members told Fortune the club was not living up to the hype. Kumi’s answer to that problem is to stay small on purpose and to gate on behavior rather than title.

The demand signal underneath all of it is not subtle. In a May 2025 MyPerfectResume survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 54% said they got a job through a personal or professional connection. In the same survey, 60% said that during a job search they reach out to only a few close contacts or to no one at all, and 34% named a lack of confidence as the reason. The mechanism works. Most people cannot bring themselves to use it.

Timing, Not Access

What members are actually buying is harder to name than access, and Kumi names it well. Among the sessions members raised most often in her three- to four-month survey check-in was a VIP dinner on how to get onto a corporate board.

“Most people don’t learn about getting on corporate boards till they’re retiring,” she said. “So having access to that is really helpful, because then they can start prepping their application, building out their network, and learning that information early.”

She makes the same argument about money. “Learning about personal finance information in your 20s is very different than learning in your 40s and 50s.”

This is the part of the pitch that should land uncomfortably for anyone who assumed a good school solved it.

“There are people coming from top schools, but even going to a top school does not mean you’ll have access to that information, because you might be siloed in one community and not cross with others,” Kumi said. Her friends put it to her more plainly: “What’s on your For You page is not on my For You page.”

Her standard for programming follows from that. “We don’t want this to be basic feel-good advice that you could get on a podcast.”

What Brands Are Buying

The business model has quietly shifted beneath creators like Caitlyn Kumi. She initially built her audience as a creator first, largely, as she puts it, to gain the confidence to speak on behalf of her own company. Today, however, that community itself has become the primary asset that attracts commercial interest.

Korean skincare brand Skin 1004 approached Kumi to host an event specifically for her members. “They specifically reached out to me because I am Caitlyn Kumi. I’m a creator. I’m a founder with this engaged community,” she explained. She views this shift as brands finally pricing community correctly: broad reach merely rents attention, whereas a vetted membership delivers people who show up, make purchases, and vouch for the brand.

Miss EmpowHer, which Kumi describes as both a media company and a women’s community, recently earned a spot on Substack’s Rising Business list. Additionally, a founder and investor dinner with a software company is penciled in for the fall. Kumi left her full-time corporate position in December 2025 to dedicate herself to running the operation full-time.

What once functioned as a workplace benefit has now transformed into a replacement network. It serves the same purpose, but it has moved outside the corporate building, is paid for with a personal card, and requires an application to join. Millennials are the primary demographic lining up for this kind of access. The 26-year-old selling it never expected that the original model would be the one showing up. Kumi did not create this market. What she did do, smartly, was read the DMs and set the right price for it.