Why women network differently.
And why they need rooms of their own.

Published 15 October 2026. Every figure below links to the study or report it comes from.

The short version

Three things are true at the same time. Women build networks that are as large and as active as men's. Those networks pay women less, in promotions and in money. And the one structural feature that does predict women reaching the top, a tight inner circle of other women, is the feature most mixed professional settings make hardest to build.

That is the argument for women's business communities in one paragraph. The rest of this page is the evidence.

The inner circle effect

The most cited study on this question is from Northwestern's Kellogg School. Yang, Chawla and Uzzi analysed 4.55 million emails from 728 MBA graduates and tracked where they landed after graduation. For men, one thing mattered: being central in the network. Well connected men placed about 1.5 times higher than poorly connected ones.

For women, centrality was not enough. Women who were central and had an inner circle made up mostly of other women reached leadership positions 2.5 times higher than women with low centrality and a male-dominated inner circle. More than three quarters of the highest placed women had that female inner circle. The authors' explanation is that women face gender-specific hurdles in hiring and promotion, and the information needed to clear them (how a company really treats women, which manager to avoid, what to negotiate) travels through trusted women, not through the open network. Read the paper or Northwestern's summary.

This finding is why we built Imperfect CEO the way we did. A big mixed event gives you centrality. It rarely gives you the inner circle.

The networking gap in numbers

Herminia Ibarra showed as early as 1992 that men form same-sex ties across several kinds of networks and get more out of them, while women tend to get emotional support from other women and practical access through men (Ibarra, Administrative Science Quarterly). Thirty years later the pattern is still measurable at scale.

• LinkedIn's talent research found women are 14% to 38% less likely than men to have a strong professional network depending on the country. In the UK the gap is 27%, in the US 28% (LinkedIn, 2020).
• LinkedIn's Economic Graph team found men's network strength sits 6 percentile points above women's. Women are 13% more likely to connect with other women; men 6% more likely to connect with other men (LinkedIn Economic Graph, 2023).
• A study of executives in Europe and North America found the same network size brought a pay return that was barely positive for men and significantly lower for women (Lalanne and Seabright, 2022).
• Interviews with 37 senior women in large German companies named two barriers at once: structural exclusion from the networks that matter, and a learned hesitation to network "instrumentally" at all, which the authors call gendered modesty (Greguletz, Diehl and Kreutzer, Human Relations).

Put together: women are not worse at networking. The returns on the same effort are lower, and the social cost of asking is higher. Which is exactly the problem a dedicated room is designed to remove.

Mentored, not sponsored

Ibarra's later work makes a distinction that explains a lot of stalled careers. A mentor gives advice. A sponsor has power and uses it for you. Mentoring raised men's chances of promotion two years later; for women it had no measurable effect, partly because women's mentors were less senior to begin with (Ibarra, 2019). Her phrase for it: women are over-mentored and under-sponsored.

The 2025 edition of McKinsey and LeanIn's Women in the Workplace, the largest study of its kind, puts numbers on the gap. For every 100 men promoted to manager, 93 women are. At entry level 31% of women have a sponsor against 45% of men, and people with sponsors are promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without (McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, 2025).

Sponsorship needs trust, and trust needs repeated contact in a small group. That is the second argument for communities that meet often and stay small.

Where the money goes

For founders the network gap turns into a funding gap, and the funding gap is well documented.

• In the UK, all-female founding teams won 9% of equity deals in 2022 but received only 2% of the money (British Business Bank, 2023). The bank's 2026 tracker reports 25% of UK equity deals going to companies with at least one female founder, and that this share fell in 2025 (Small Business Equity Tracker 2026).
• Across Europe, companies with at least one female founder took 20.6% of venture deal value in 2024. All-female teams raised 814.6 million euros, which works out to under 2% of the total (PitchBook, 2024).
• In European deep tech, 14% of founders are women and they receive 11.4% of funding. In Eastern Europe, women-led startups receive 3.6% of regional funding (EIT and EIB via WomenINvestEU, 2025).
• Part of the gap is in the room itself. At TechCrunch Disrupt, investors asked male founders promotion questions (how will you win) and female founders prevention questions (how will you not lose). Founders asked promotion questions raised significantly more, and female investors showed the same bias (Kanze, Huang, Conley and Higgins, Columbia).

Warm introductions are how most early money moves. If your inner circle contains no one who has raised, you are pitching cold into a process already tilted against you.

What actually works

The sceptical question is fair: do women-only or women-focused programmes change outcomes, or do they just feel good? Two studies answer it with real numbers.

• In a randomised trial, female economists who attended a women-only mentoring workshop were 9.3 percentage points more likely to hold a tenured post at a top-50 institution years later, against a baseline of 12.6%, and published about 1.6 more papers (Ginther, Currie, Blau and Croson, AEA 2020; working paper with figures). A randomised trial is the strongest kind of evidence there is.
• Across 708 US companies over three decades, corporate networking programmes raised the share of white women in management by 6.7%, and mentoring programmes raised the share of Black women by 23.5% from a low base (Kalev, Dobbin and Kelly, American Sociological Review 2006). The same study found that diversity training alone did little.

The common thread: structured, repeated contact among women, with people senior enough to open doors. Not a one-off panel.

Poland is a special case

Poland is where Imperfect CEO started, and it is unusual in Europe. Women own 25.4% of Polish companies, the highest share in Europe against roughly 8% to 16% in most EU countries (PARP, 2026). The gap in early-stage entrepreneurship is also one of the smallest on the continent: 2.3% of Polish women run a young business against 2.6% of men (GEM Poland 2025).

So Polish women start companies. What they lack, as the Eastern Europe funding figure above shows, is the capital and the connected circle that turns a company into a bigger one. That is the gap between Warsaw and London that this community exists to close. It is also why so many of our members are Polish women who built careers abroad, and expat women who built them in Poland: the people who already know how much the room matters.

How to design a room for women

Everything above translates into a few design rules. They are the rules we use.

• Small, so the inner circle can form. Our dinners seat 12 to 18. Our 1:1 CoffeeConnect pairs two people. A room of 300 produces business cards, not confidants.
• Senior enough to sponsor. Founders, directors and managers who run teams and budgets. Peer support is good; a peer who can hire you or introduce you to her investor is better.
• Repeated, not one-off. Monthly evenings in Warsaw, regular dinners in London, and a calendar that lets you see the same faces three or four times a year.
• Honest by design. Our Talks format is called Unfiltered for a reason. The information that helps women (what a company is really like, what someone really earns) only moves when the room is safe enough to say it.
• No permanent fee. You pay for the evening you attend, which keeps the room open to the woman at 29 and the one at 52, in Warsaw and in Mayfair.

If you want to see the practical version, our guides to women's clubs in London and the full London directory compare the options, and the calendar shows the next evening.

Sources

Yang, Chawla and Uzzi, A network's gender composition and communication pattern predict women's leadership success, PNAS 116(6), 2019 · Ibarra, Homophily and differential returns, Administrative Science Quarterly 37(3), 1992 · Greguletz, Diehl and Kreutzer, Why women build less effective networks than men, Human Relations · Lalanne and Seabright, The old boy network, Journal of Institutional Economics 18(5), 2022 · LinkedIn Talent Solutions, Women less likely to have strong networks, 2020 · LinkedIn Economic Graph, Network homophily and strength by gender, 2023 · Ibarra, A lack of sponsorship is keeping women from advancing, 2019 · McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2025 · British Business Bank, 2023 report and Small Business Equity Tracker 2026 · PitchBook, 2024 European All In: Female Founders · WomenINvestEU, Women in European deep tech, 2025 · Columbia Business School, Closing the gender gap in startup funding, 2017 · Ginther, Currie, Blau and Croson, Can mentoring help female assistant professors?, AEA Papers and Proceedings 110, 2020 · Kalev, Dobbin and Kelly, Best practices or best guesses?, American Sociological Review 71(4), 2006 · PARP, Przedsiębiorczość kobiet w Europie, 2026 · PARP, GEM Poland 2025.