The Women Cracking Corporate America’s Most Exclusive Boys’ Club

Everyone knows what a boardroom looks like, or thinks they do: a table the length of a municipal pier; dark wood paneling; leather chairs; men in navy suits deciding the fate of a company, a country, or a very expensive merger. It is corporate power at its most cinematic. What you have almost certainly never seen is how anyone gets in—and women have been on the wrong side of this secret for a very long time.

In the early 2010s, they held about 10 percent of corporate board seats. Then came the pressure: organizations tracking the numbers, investors pushing companies to diversify, a post-2020 moment when representation briefly became something corporations were expected to prove. The number climbed until it reached about 30 percent. Then, around 2022, it began to stall— and has hovered there since.

That stall matters because corporate boards are not ornamental. They hire and fire CEOs, approve strategy, oversee risk, shape compensation, and decide—in ways both obvious and invisible—what kind of company a company is allowed to become. And unlike most powerful positions, board seats are rarely applied for in any ordinary sense. There is often no posting or neat application portal, no tidy little moment when a qualified person raises their hand and gets considered. A name moves from one trusted person to another, through rooms most people never see, before anyone outside the room knows there was an opening at all. For most of their history, seats have been filled by men who knew other men through golf clubs, alumni networks, and private dinners—the kinds of introductions that were never extended to women.

Now an entire cottage industry has cropped up to try to change that, built by a handful of women who saw a wall and decided to build something around it. You can now spend $14,500 on a five-day intensive at Harvard Business School or $750 on a two-day boot camp at a law school in North Carolina, both designed to prepare women for corporate board service. You can attend curated dinners where the guest list is split between women who want board seats and the people who can grant them. You can take a workshop, join a networking fellowship, or add your name to a searchable database of board-ready candidates. The question now is whether any of it can actually open the door from the other side.

Almost a decade ago, after a fellowship at the Aspen Institute, Jocelyn Mangan founded Illumyn Impact with a simple premise: If women weren’t part of the existing networks that filled board seats, she would build a new one. So she interviewed a hundred board members. When she asked how they had found their last director, she didn’t hear much about formal searches or résumés. She heard about friends, dinners, investors, trusted people recommending other trusted people. “They gave me all these personal-network stories, and a lot of them were at private dinners,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, well, we can do that.’ ”

Illumyn now operates as both a nonprofit and a for-profit, generating revenue through placement fees when a woman lands a board seat, corporate sponsorships, and a paid fellowship. The dinners themselves are free for the women at the table. Nearly 200 dinners later, the model remains simple: Seat board-ready women next to CEOs, investors, and sitting directors—the three powers that actually decide who gets a seat. “The official stat is that less than five percent of board opportunities flow through recruiters,” Mangan says. “It’s a big word-of-mouth network of opportunities.” The case for diversifying that network, she argues, isn’t just moral. “Boards fail when they’re composed of the same perspectives. And it’s not just demographic sameness. This is experiential and cognitive sameness.”

When the model works, it works spectacularly. Liz Jenkins, like most women who’d never been part of those networks, had absorbed the standard cultural programming of board service. Then the CFO of Hello Sunshine and a cofounder of FEME (Female Executives in Media and Entertainment), Jenkins, who is currently Chief Business Officer at NBCUniversal Entertainment, met Mangan at a dinner in late 2018 and was stunned to learn that she was already board-ready. “It wasn’t on my bingo card for my 40s, frankly,” she says. “My images are what I’d seen in movies. I’ve got to be 65 or 70, a retired CEO.”

That image matters, because if the boardroom is treated like a place for older people previously anointed by the system, even highly qualified women can fail to recognize themselves as candidates. Mangan’s response was less gentle reframing than loving correction: “Are you kidding me? You are a CFO. This is the candidate people are dying for.”

Jenkins declined the first invitation—she was deep into building a company and had no bandwidth left—and couldn’t make the second. But when the third invitation arrived, something about the guest list caught her attention: She realized she didn’t recognize almost anyone on it. “I looked at the names, and I think I only knew one person. I’m like, ‘This is interesting. It’s L.A. Don’t I know everybody?’ ” So she went. At the dinner, she met Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of GLAAD—who, it turned out, had heard Jenkins would be there and came specifically to meet her. “Well, I came to this dinner because I wanted to talk to you and see if you’d be interested in joining the board,” Jenkins remembers Ellis saying.

Within a year, Jenkins was on the board of both GLAAD and Snapchat. She went on to chair the first and become audit chair of the second. “I just need to tell you what an impact you’ve made,” she remembers telling Mangan. “One dinner—and what kind of came out of that.”

But an introduction, however powerful it may be, doesn’t teach you what a board actually does, how seats get filled, or why nothing about the process resembles anything else in corporate life. For that, there’s the classroom.

Picture this: It’s the week after Thanksgiving. A hundred and fifty women who, collectively, have enough executive experience to run a small nation are checking into dorms at Harvard Business School. They have been assigned suitemates. They will do homework. Some of them have not had a roommate since Reagan was in office. The women are chosen to clash productively: different countries, different industries, different functions. For five days, they will learn what board service actually is. On Tuesday afternoon, they will open up to their suitemates about what brought them there and where they want to go next. By Wednesday, they’ve bonded. And by Friday, they leave with sharper instincts, a global network, and a $14,500 receipt.

The program is called Women on Boards: Succeeding as a Corporate Director, and it has run annually since 2016. The curriculum is built around Harvard’s signature case-study method. Guest speakers are sitting corporate directors, and sessions cover everything from fiduciary duties to committee structures to the strategic mindset the boardroom demands. Vicki Good, who has directed it since the beginning, says the goal has always been governance education: “We made the conscious decision back in 2015 that this program was not a placement program,” she says. But education is only part of what the women take away: “Where they come as individuals, they leave as part of this incredible network, and I think they really feel empowered,” she says.

At the other end of the price spectrum, Lissa Broome has been working on the same problem for 20 years. At the University of North Carolina School of Law, Broome directs the Director Diversity Initiative, a program that began in 2006 after two law school graduates went to the dean with a concern: There didn’t seem to be many Black people on corporate boards. Broome widened the frame to include women and built an operation that now runs an annual two-day boot camp, monthly webinars, a searchable database of more than 1,500 prospective directors, and curated resources—21 boot camps and counting, with 59 companies coming to DDI to find board candidates in 2025 alone.

It’s $750 for the boot camp. Everything else is free. That matters because many women who find DDI are not the obvious heirs to the boardroom pipeline. “A lot of people who are from nontraditional backgrounds find their way to us because they’re not a sitting CEO or a sitting chief financial officer whose company is helping them get a board seat,” Broome says. Some companies do sponsor their executives to attend board-readiness programs, but not every woman pursuing a seat has that kind of backing. Women at smaller companies, in nontraditional industries, in between roles, or who are building portfolio careers on their own are navigating the ecosystem with their personal money and time. “If you’re doing that on your own, then I would question, ‘Is this really worth the money?’” Broome says. “‘Is this how I want to spend my limited resources?’”

More programs, more dinners, more boot camps, more databases than ever—but women are still stuck at 30 percent. Heather Spilsbury, the CEO of 50/50 Women on Boards, leads an organization that has tracked this number since 2010. She is unequivocal on the talent question. “There’s no shortage of qualified women to serve on boards,” she says. “They are phenomenal women.” But she is candid about what preparation can and cannot do. “To overeducate and overprepare yourself has become a business, and that concerns me,” she says, “because it’s a business of a relationship—someone’s got to know you.” Preparedness alone, she argues, won’t change who gets appointed.

“Companies, investors, recruiters also have a responsibility to broaden their networks and strengthen board succession practices.”

The backdrop makes all this feel more urgent. In 2024, 90 percent of companies included DEI language in their annual reports. By 2025, that number had collapsed to 34 percent. Broome has watched the momentum build and cool firsthand. “There’s been a plateauing of the focus on corporate board diversity, both for women and for people of color,” she says. “And it’s, in part, as a result of the kind of changing political climate that we’ve experienced."

Nicole Jeffries, an independent director at Interstate Batteries who found her way to a board seat through DDI’s webinars, saw the divide firsthand. Her male colleagues treated the process as something they could figure out as they went along: “Yeah, I’m just going to go apply to a board. I know a guy who knows a guy, and they’re going to love me.” Women, meanwhile, were thinking: Oh, I need to make sure my board documents are perfect and they’ve been reviewed by the 50 best people I know and that I’ve gotten 10 certifications and 14 references. The result: “They want to go and do all the proving so that when they show up in the room, they’ve got those 10 boxes checked,” she says.

The wall these women have built an ecosystem to get around may be getting higher even as the scaffolding grows, but the work has not been wasted: Mangan has placed roughly 200 women on boards, Jeffries used the free webinars and landed a seat before even starting the boot camp, and Jenkins went to one dinner and ended up chairing two boards. “I find joy in helping open doors and seeing people land opportunities that they are so capable of but maybe would not have had access to,” Mangan tells me. “There’s no shortage of work to do. It’s not like I feel like we’re done or we’re close.”

Karen Coyne had spent eight years as a chief sustainability officer at a pharmaceutical company—her dream role, as she describes it—when she took the Harvard program in 2018. It changed how she understood the job. “You no longer can be the doer,” she says. “You have to have a strategic mindset.” The discipline, as she describes it, is almost physical: “As a board director, you have your nose into the business but your fingers out.”

Coyne was so energized by the experience that she helped grow what Harvard hadn’t built yet: an alumni network called Women Execs on Boards, which started as WhatsApp groups and check-in calls, has grown to nearly 400 members across 32 countries and now sends its members back to Harvard each year to speak to the newest cohort. She estimates that about 40 percent of them now sit on compensated corporate boards. The network exists because of the question that rippled through the very first cohort the moment the week ended: “They left and said, ‘Well, this is great. How do you actually get on a board?’”

She has served on nonprofit and advisory boards, and on the board of a small company she helped manage. But the seat she set out to find—a paid fiduciary role on a corporate board—has eluded her. “I’ve interviewed and come close to being second up,” she says. It has been eight years.

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.