Network Logic - Index of

9. Old boys and new girls
women’s networks and diversity in
the workplace
Helen McCarthy
Hightech-Women meets on the first Wednesday of every month at
the Women’s University Club, located in an elegant nineteenthcentury
brick building in Mayfair. It is an unusual mix of capsule
wardrobes, mobile phones, wood-panelled walls and floral-patterned
carpets. And yet, the union of these two women’s organisations with
very different styles could not be more fitting. The club was
established in 1886 for the growing numbers of women entering
higher education and the professions; today, it also provides a
meeting place for a network of ambitious women in technologyrelated
occupations, first brought together by venture capitalist Lucy
Marcus in 2000. Hightech-Women’s members might be very different
from their Victorian and Edwardian forebears, but they exhibit every
bit as much appetite for pooling their collective resources in a much
changed but still unequal world. Or, for what an early advocate of the
women’s networking movement simply describes as ‘getting together
to get ahead’. 1
Hightech-Women is one of a growing movement of networks
creating professional communities of women across many sectors. Yet
this phenomenon is little understood and sparsely documented. This
essay, based on emerging findings from a Demos research project, sets
out to understand how women’s networks function and to explore the
contribution they might make to equality and diversity goals in a socalled
‘post-feminist’ era.
Demos 117