Stiletto Network

Playing the Gender Card

It wasn’t that Pelletier had never experienced professional support from women. There was one other female in her “Leadership Challenge” class, as the Sprint bench of six were called, and the two made a pact to share promotion and compensation details, and to help each other script difficult conversations for as long as they worked as colleagues. But it was only when she left the comfort of Kansas that Pelletier found strength in numbers. 4C2B women were drawn from different arenas, and through the sheer breadth of their expertise and connections, they could affect large-scale change.

In the past, women like Pelletier had few outlets for their concerns as they rose in their careers. They relied on supportive male mentors ...