I have spent most of my life looking for a group of women who were just there for each other. Not performatively or conditionally. Just — there.

I didn’t find it in high school, where the social arithmetic was zero-sum by design or in a college sorority, where sisterhood seemed like a branding exercise. And I most definitely didn’t find it in corporate environments, where the scarcity of opportunity turned potential allies into competitors and the unspoken rules about who gets to advance made it hard to trust anyone climbing the same ladder.

More than once, I considered that maybe, as Taylor Swift so eloquently put it, the problem was me.

And then, somewhere in my career journey, amidst the scroll of LinkedIn — a platform I’d mostly associated with congratulatory job announcements and perfunctory thought leadership that read like it was written by a ridiculously dull committee — I stumbled into something I hadn’t expected. Women who operate the way I had always wanted women to operate with each other, and with me. They share pricing and pass referrals to one another. They tag each other into opportunities without keeping score. They build together rather than beside each other, and most importantly, rather than against each other.

It was, for lack of a more eloquent way of saying it, awesomely weird. And it was also exactly the thing I'd always been looking for. I just never thought I'd find it in a "Sisterhood of the Traveling LinkedIn Post" environment.

What I’ve come to understand about these women — and about the broader pattern they represent — is that what looks like generosity is actually business strategy. And the structural conditions behind it tell a larger story, about what happens when institutions stop investing in women's advancement. Women start investing in each other.

When The Infrastructure Disappears

The 2025 Women in the Workplace report, the largest annual study of women in corporate America conducted by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, found that corporate support for gender diversity programs has dropped significantly since its peak in 2017. More than 10% of companies surveyed had reduced or discontinued sponsorship, career development and diversity training programs in the prior 12 months alone. Women make up just 29% of C-suite roles, a figure unchanged from the year before, and for every 100 men promoted to their first managerial role, only 81 women make the same jump — a gap McKinsey has termed "the broken rung."

The Conference Board’s 2025 corporate diversity disclosure study found that this retreat extends beyond programming into transparency itself. Among S&P 500 companies, the share tying DEI metrics to executive compensation fell from 68% to 35%, and use of the "DEI" acronym in major filings dropped 68%. As principal researcher Andrew Jones noted, companies aren’t necessarily abandoning these commitments — they’re just "selectively reframing commitments, reducing public exposure, and embedding oversight more quietly." Which seems to be a polite way of saying the work is going underground at precisely the moment it needs to be visible with lots of glitter.

For years, the response to data like this was institutional: companies launched women’s leadership programs, created mentorship pipelines, and funded employee resource groups. But institutional programming only runs as long as there’s a budget line for it, and when that line disappears so does the infrastructure that women were conditioned to rely on.

What Replaces Institutional Support

Across industries and at different scales, women are answering the question of what replaces institutional support with construction. And the model they’re building looks fundamentally different from how most people have understood career ambition, because it's not organized around individual advancement.

Nicole "Nikki" Ramirez is a marketing consultant, LinkedIn creator, TEDx speaker and co-founder of BrandME Labs, a personal branding agency she built with brand strategist Ivonne Kinser. Before all of that, she was a director of marketing.

"The hardest part wasn’t the logistics," Ramirez shared in an email interview reflecting on her experience being laid off from her director of marketing role. "It was the fear that people would see my layoff as failure. For so long I had tied my identity and my self-worth to being seen as successful and to me, success had a very specific look: a good job, a fancy title, a big brand name behind me."

What followed wasn't a traditional comeback story — Ramirez didn't dust off her resume, update her LinkedIn headline and climb back onto the same corporate ladder she'd just fallen off of. She built a different structure entirely, one that started with showing up on LinkedIn with real stories about the layoff, the pivots, the uncertainty, and within 18 months she'd grown her following from 2,400 to more than 30,000 and built a six-figure consulting practice.

But none of it was built in isolation, and that’s the part of this story that matters most. Ramirez shares pricing openly with peers, passes work to other women when something isn’t the right fit, makes introductions to brands and media without keeping score, and gives things away for free when she knows it’ll help someone else move forward. And she’s not an outlier — she’s part of a growing group of women operating exactly this way. And, they’re doing it very publicly.

The instinct to dismiss this as soft — as women just being nice to each other — is exactly what this story is challenging. Yes, these women might be being nice, but they’re also being strategic.

Ramirez recently partnered with Kinser and global sourcing and manufacturing executive Angelina Garcia to form Y-Not Collective, a marketing and innovation ecosystem now serving enterprise clients including Carnival, Coca-Cola and Google. Three women, three distinct skill sets, one integrated business that none of them could have built alone.

"Men tend to exit and build vertically: I'm the expert, I scale me," Ramirez said. "Women, in what I'm observing, are more likely to exit and build horizontally: I know five people who are exceptional at adjacent things, and together we can serve a client better than any of us could alone."

From Scarcity To Structure

That observation — men build vertically, women build horizontally — is not just a behavioral preference or a feel-good distinction. It’s a different business architecture entirely. And it’s showing up across industries in ways that suggest something structural.

Toni Ronayne spent over two decades as a senior executive in hospitality, most recently as brand president of a national restaurant chain. When she was restructured out, she entered a search process alongside more than 500 women — seasoned executives: presidents, CMOs, CFOs — all competing for a single seat.

"What struck me wasn’t that 500 women were competing for one executive role," Ronayne shared with me in an email. "It was that the industry had normalized a system where extraordinary expertise was forced into artificial scarcity."

A year later, she had built The C Society , a collective of 50 fractional C-suite operators — 90% of them women — serving restaurant and hospitality brands, and she now receives roughly 20 applications per week from senior executives who want in.

But Ronayne didn’t build a staffing agency or a glorified talent marketplace. She built what she describes as a new leadership model, one designed around a specific structural insight.

"The problem wasn't talent scarcity," she said. "It was talent architecture. We were forcing modern business problems into outdated leadership structures."

The C Society deploys curated teams of integrated operators rather than placing individual executives into individual roles. A founder-stage technology company in the restaurant space, for example, gained access to more than 70 years of combined executive experience — from brand development to go-to-market strategy — before its product even entered a test market. Instead of learning through expensive mistakes or slowly assembling a leadership team one hire at a time, the founder could focus on developing the product while accessing precisely the expertise the business needed at each stage, which is a fundamentally different value proposition than "here's a person who can fill your open req."

"The traditional model optimizes for permanence," Ronayne said. "Modern business demands adaptability."

What connects Ramirez and Ronayne — across different industries, at different scales, with entirely different client bases — is the skill at the center of both models. It’s not domain expertise, though both have plenty of it. It’s the ability to see what other people are good at and create the conditions for those strengths to connect and compound, which is the kind of skill that has historically been categorized as relational, interpersonal, or "soft," and therefore systematically undervalued by the very institutions that benefit most from it.

Ramirez sees it in her coaching practice — the gap between how women describe themselves and what they actually bring to the table. "They describe their function. I can see their impact," she said. "A woman will tell me she's 'a marketing director with fifteen years of experience' and what I actually see is someone who has built cultures, navigated impossible organizational politics and moved people emotionally through their work — but she's been trained to lead with the job description."

Ronayne sees the same gap from the business side, where companies need more expertise than ever before but don’t always need it packaged in a traditional full-time structure and a permanent line on the org chart. "The future executive team may not sit inside one org chart," she said.

The person who can look at three distinct operators, understand their individual strengths and see the business that becomes possible when you put them together — that person has an outsized market advantage in a fractional and collective economy where clients are increasingly buying outcomes rather than hours. And the fact that this skill has been quietly practiced by women for decades without ever being recognized as a marketable competency is, in many ways, the whole point.

That’s not generosity. It’s an astute business model.

Rational Responses To Rigged Structures

The abundance-versus-scarcity framing is one both women return to, but they’re careful to locate it in structure rather than personality, which matters because the temptation is always to turn this into a story about individual mindset when it’s actually a story about economic design. The scarcity isn’t imagined. It’s very real. In corporate environments, the seats genuinely are limited — fewer budgets, fewer sponsors, fewer roles at the top — and the instinct to protect your position in that context isn’t petty or small. It’s completely rational.

"The instinct to protect your position isn't irrational," Ramirez said. "It's a rational response to a rigged structure. What shifted for me was leaving that structure and realizing that outside of it, the math is completely different. When you're building your own thing, another woman winning doesn't take anything from you — it actually expands what's possible."

Ronayne frames the same shift in systems language, which makes sense given that she spent two decades thinking about how organizations actually work from the inside. "I wasn't interested in building a network," she said. "I was interested in building a new leadership model. Instead of competing for one role, expertise can compound, move fluidly and create value across multiple organizations simultaneously. Our leaders don't compete for one seat at the table. They sit at multiple tables."

This is not a universal shift, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Ramirez is clear about that. "In industries where scarcity is still structurally enforced, the old dynamics persist because they have to," she said. "What's changed is that more women now have proof of concept — they can see what's possible when the collaboration is real."

Designing Around A Different Life

There is another dimension to this shift that is entering workforce analyses chats, and Ramirez raised it unprompted, which tells you something about how central it is to lived experience even when it’s not a focal point in the research: motherhood.

"The systems were not designed for women, and they were especially not designed for mothers," she said. "The corporate structure that asks you to be available at all hours, to travel on short notice, to put your ambition on hold when your family needs you — that structure was built around a life that most women aren't living."

When she stepped outside of it, she didn't just gain professional freedom. She gained time with her family, which sounds simple but is, for many women, the thing that corporate life made feel impossible without penalty. For many of the women she sees building their own infrastructure, she said, "that's not a side benefit — that's the whole point."

This observation helps sharpen the narrative, because women leaving corporate structures and building collectives, fractional practices and referral economies are not just responding to a broken pipeline. They are also designing around a constraint that the traditional model doesn’t fully embrace: that ambitious women also have lives.

According to MBO Partners’ 15th State of Independence report , the U.S. independent workforce totaled 72.9 million people, including 27.6 million full-time independents and 37.4 million occasional independents. Those numbers represent a workforce that is increasingly choosing independence not as a fallback but as a structure — and the women building things like collectives and fractional models are driving that shift. These numbers also suggest that independent work is becoming a more durable career structure.

Ronayne sees this evolution accelerating as AI reshapes how companies think about deploying expertise, arguing that the collective model is structurally aligned with where business is already heading. "The companies that win in the AI era will likely be the ones that can integrate expertise, technology and decision-making the fastest," she said — and in that framing, the women who have already been building fluid, collaborative, trust-based ecosystems aren't behind the curve. They're ahead of it.

One of the last questions I sent Ramirez was what she wants to be known for — not a brand, not a title, but one structural observation about how women work and build. Her answer was unequivocal.

"The women who are winning right now — really winning, not just surviving — are the ones who stopped waiting for systems that were never built for them and started building their own."

There is a version of this story that ends with a call to action — tips for building your own collective, a checklist to create an abundance mindset, and three steps to finding your people. But, that’s not this story. Sorry.

This is a story about reframing how we think about success and sisterhood. It’s about what happens when the institutional infrastructure for women’s advancement contracts and women choose to respond not with protest and recoil but with construction. They don’t picket the old table, although they might want to. Instead, they build a new table, bring their friends, some great snacks, and start taking clients.

This version can be incredibly messy, but it’s also harder to defund. And, these women who can see what everyone else is good at — and build the room around it — are going to be the ones rewriting the economics of how leadership actually works.