Recently, Chief CEO Alison Moore sat down with TIME Senior Editor Ayesha Javed to share her unique vantage on the future of women’s work and ambition.
Reflecting on her first year in her role, their conversation covered everything from AI disruption, to growing move toward solopreneurship and fractional leadership, to building a career (and community) with intention.
Here are five of our top takeaways:
1. The future of work for women looks like a lattice, not a ladder
“There was an assumption that women, particularly in taking the safe route, are going to stay on whatever predetermined ladder somebody said originally, because it's really scary to kind of jump off a ladder. And in fact, what you see in [our] research, and what you see at Chief, is that women are stepping off the ladder. And this is why our new metaphor for this is the lattice. So if you think about a career having zigs and zags, having pauses and then accelerations, this doesn't allow for just a vertical climb in one direction. Let's prepare for a career that looks like that. How do we embrace that as normal and, in fact, powerful?”
2. Stepping off the corporate ladder doesn’t mean stepping back in seniority
“[Women are asking,] ‘What's available to me that can still give me growth and meaningful impact and aligns with my values and autonomy’… You're seeing different kinds of alliances of people coming together and building businesses and working creatively together and figuring out how they keep their financial success and momentum going, I think that certainly speaks for an entrepreneurial set of women. And I think that's a growing piece: builders, solopreneurs, even fractionals. For women that are fractional CFOs, fractional COOs, they still keep proximity to power, because they are clipping in with CEOs. They come in and do a few special opps along their subject matter expertise, and in that, find enormous flexibility while still having very senior strategic work at hand.”
3. Women leaders are finding opportunity in disruption
“Disruption is everywhere. But I do think that that disruption is being used by the women that we see achieve, senior women leaders who have reached a level of experience, and they're using that disruption to actually think about their careers with more intention, and their career pathing with more intention. The changing economy has made their career progression less reliable. And the thing I love about that is, [they’re thinking] OK, then what am I going to do about it? They're actually taking the wheel more directly, if you will.”
4. Inclusivity and transparency go together
“...that diversity of experience, identities and perspectives, that that is a business imperative and it's a business imperative too, that makes us all smarter in this in this conversation, more agile in our thinking, which drives better business outcomes… That's why the community that I inherited in February [2025] — and this is absolutely my commitment — needs to reflect the majority of women and women senior leaders today, and we need to be doing this together as a community. And this community at Chief holds space for their experiences, identities, ambitions, all of it, and will continue to.”
5. What’s missing from the prevailing narrative around the AI gender gap
“[Chief and The Harris Poll’s] research is telling us something important: The companies that will win aren’t just the ones moving fastest. They’re the ones being most intentional about what they’re building alongside the technology. Judgment. Institutional knowledge. The leadership pipeline. Those things don’t scale automatically, they must be invested in. Women leaders understand that as they’re building the workplace of the future. They’re not slowing down on AI. They’re making sure the humans keeping pace with it don’t get left behind in the process.”
