Why members-only club Chief, with a waitlist of 60K, hates the term ‘girl boss’ • TechCrunch

president Co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsey Kaplan started the company because they had first-hand experience of being CEOs without much support. They’ve created a community of female leaders that now number 20,000, with 60,000 sitting on waiting lists, but don’t call these women “girl managers.”

The two women appeared in TechCrunch disabled Today in San Francisco.

Kaplan asked the audience how many men call themselves “Little Chiefs.” No one raised his hand.

“We don’t use the phrase ‘boy coach.’ We use the phrase ‘girl manager’ only because we put women in another category rather than just assuming that women can be leaders. And so I don’t like the phrase because of that. I don’t like thinking about women in leadership. It’s just leadership,” Kaplan told a Disrupt audience.

She added, “How do we celebrate women, not demolish them, and not line up as leaders by calling them ‘girl bosses’ and really making sure that women can lead and do it their own way.”

The three-year-old startup has grown from a group of 200 people in New York City to a 20,000-strong organization that raised $140 million on a $1 billion valuation.

However, they have another 60,000 women who would like to join. Kaplan stresses that giving its members a highly curated, valuable experience is more important than rapidly growing and losing their value proposition.

“The experience of the members is the most important. So when you ask about growth, when we think about how only 5 million women are scratched [executives] In the US, it is very important for us to make sure that members really like their experience.”

It all comes down to the mission being born into personal experience, Childers says.

“When I started getting into the room where decisions are made, and I realized that there are differences in the way conversations are held for different people within the organization, it was just so exciting to me,” she said. I decided that creating a network of like-minded women could be incredibly beneficial.

This week the company opened what they called a “club” in San Francisco, a place where women meet face to face. They have three others in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In addition, they expanded outside the United States to the United Kingdom for the first time.