Why the room full of women doesn't fix it
Almost every woman in our research had already tried a women's networking event. Most had tried several. The response was consistent: politely positive, and quietly unconvinced.
That's not a contradiction. It's what the research on professional networking would predict.
Herminia Ibarra's foundational 1992 study on network homophily, the tendency of people to form ties with others similar to themselves, found something specific about women's networks: they were often rich in emotional support and thin in what she called instrumental resources. Access to opportunity, sponsorship, the kind of relationship that actually changes what happens next in a career. A 2019 study of 37 senior female leaders in German corporations, led by Elisa Greguletz, found the same pattern from the inside. These weren't women avoiding networking out of naivety. Many actively resisted it, uncomfortable treating relationships as instrumental, and reaching instead for what the researchers called authentic bonds over strategic ones.
Being in a room with other women, in other words, doesn't automatically solve the problem women are trying to solve. Who's in the room matters less than what the room is built to do.
One woman in our research described the version of this most respondents lived with daily: "I figure it out alone. I do not want to look like I am struggling." Not because there was nowhere to go. She'd been to the events. The rooms existed. What she was describing was a room that couldn't hold what she actually needed to say in it.
Our own data traced the same gap from the other direction. Asked to describe existing networking spaces, over a third of respondents independently reached for the same two words: performative, and transactional. Nobody was prompted to say either. And when we asked what they actually wanted instead, the pattern held together. Strategic relationship building, trusted introductions, real visibility, honest advisory conversation. Not one respondent, out of dozens, asked for more content or another workshop. The format most professional spaces default to, information delivered to a room, was the one thing nobody was asking for.
Three separate lines of evidence, an academic study on network composition, a qualitative study on why women resist instrumental networking, and our own primary research, arrive at the same conclusion from three different directions. The problem was never headcount. A room of fifty, or five hundred, is built for breadth. It optimizes for how many people you meet, not how well any one relationship holds up under weight. You can leave with forty new contacts and still be exactly as alone with the decision you came in with.
The alternative isn't a smarter networking event. It's a different structure entirely, one built around depth instead of reach. Six people who stay in the room long enough to actually track each other's situation month over month. Not a wider net. A smaller number of people who are actually, reliably there.
That's the reason Concentric isn't a networking format with better production values. It's built around a specific finding, repeated across independent evidence: what's missing was never more people. It's the same few people, consistently, in a structure that makes disappearing into the crowd impossible.