Issue: Women’s Co-Working Spaces Women’s Co-Working Spaces By: Lisa Rabasca Roepe Pub. Date: March 4, 2019 Access Date: September 30, 2021 DOI: 10.1177/237455680507.n1 Source URL: http://businessresearcher.sagepub.com/sbr-2022-109172-2918442/20190304/womens-co-working-spaces ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Do they meet the needs of female entrepreneurs? Executive Summary As co-working spaces have grown in popularity among people seeking to rent office space to work independently, co-working facilities designed especially for women have also spread. These businesses cater to female entrepreneurs by providing an abundance of collaborative space and a pleasing ambience, programs on honing business skills and opportunities to pitch potential investors. Many have also adopted formal anti-sexual harassment policies. However, co-working spaces oriented toward women have had to address whether to accept male members. While several have done so since their inception, one, The Wing, was sued recently over its female-only membership policy and has changed its rules to allow men to join. Some key takeaways: The market for co-working spaces oriented toward women seems to be growing, with several providers expanding across the United States and into other countries. The cost of joining can be prohibitive for some potential members, and some facilities offer scholarships, or reduced rates for those who agree to perform volunteer duties. While these facilities resemble business accelerators in some ways, they are less structured and do not require entrepreneurs to offer an equity stake in their businesses to those running the space. Full Report The Wing co-founder Audrey Gelman (L) and actress Jennifer Lawrence speak at The Wing’s facility in New York’s Soho neighborhood. (Monica Schipper/Getty Images for The Wing) Entrepreneur Julia Beck gets energized when she can bounce ideas off peers and colleagues, so she began working out of Serendipity Labs in Bethesda, Md., which provides workspaces to both men and women. She discovered the site offered mostly private offices, which meant there was less opportunity for members to share ideas or collaborate. “Offices bring doors and doors bring privacy,” says Beck, founder of It’s Working Project, a Washington company that seeks to help businesses ease the transition of new parents back into the workplace. “Privacy has its place, but that doesn’t feel very inspirational.” Page 2 of 12 Women’s Co-Working Spaces SAGE Business Researcher ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. In search of a different experience, Beck joined The Wing, a co-working space designed primarily for women that seeks to nurture collaboration and a sense of community as well as greater “mobility and prosperity” for its target audience. 1 Beck says she appreciates The Wing’s sense of openness and the unpredictable mix of people in the facility. She says working there “brings more excitement, energy and drive into my daily life.” Co-working spaces, where people working remotely or independently can rent office space for a few hundred dollars a month, have become increasingly popular in the past decade. And since 2016, there has been a proliferation of co-working spaces designed and developed especially for women. The Wing, The Riveter (named for Rosie the Riveter, the World War II-era symbol), RISE Collaborative Workspace in St. Louis, The Broad in Richmond, Va., Women in Kind in Denver and The Coven in Minneapolis are among the sites that have opened recently, giving women an alternative to large, co-gender spaces such as WeWork and Industrious. “There are needs women have that aren’t addressed at more general co-working spaces,” says Jamie Russo, executive director of the Global Workspace Association, a trade group based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Some of that is programming, some of that is comfort level,” and some of it may be part of the cultural reaction to the #MeToo movement, Russo says. Female business owners are concerned that they are not getting the same amount of support and resources as their male counterparts, a survey by PlanBeyond, a Seattle market research and strategy agency, found. 2 Female-oriented co-working spaces are helping to meet this need by offering programming that ranges from the fundamentals of marketing to creating compelling business pitches, says Laura Troyani, founder and principal of PlanBeyond. What these spaces offer “aligns well with the gaps women are telling us they’re experiencing right now in their day-to-day business operations,” Troyani says. “On top of that, these spaces afford entrepreneurs the opportunity to connect with other women who’ve tackled the issues they’re facing. It means a ready-made network when they don’t already have one.” Women Less Optimistic About Business Performance Percentages of men and women optimistic about business’s performance and pessimistic about funding, 2019 Source: “2019 Small Business Owner Report: The Male vs Female Divide,” PlanBeyond, November 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y222g2y8 Female small-business owners were less optimistic than men about how their businesses will perform and more likely to name access to funding as a reason for pessimism, according to a 2018 survey by a marketing research agency. The trend toward female-oriented facilities began to emerge with spaces such as Hera Hub, which opened in 2011 in San Diego and has expanded to Carlsbad, Calif., Phoenix, Washington and overseas to Sweden. The trend really took off in 2016 when The Wing opened in New York City and The Riveter began in Seattle, sparking a proliferation of co-working spaces for women. Page 3 of 12 Women’s Co-Working Spaces SAGE Business Researcher ©2021 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The common element in these spaces is an effort to meet the needs and preferences of working women. This includes decors and amenities, such as plants, calming colors, aromatherapy, lactation rooms and classes in yoga, meditation and barre. But it goes beyond atmospherics; these spaces also offer classes and workshops to help women expand their businesses. The Riveter provides weekly meetings with venture capital firms and Hera Hub and The Wing sponsor pitch competitions, allowing members to present their business ideas to investors and compete for funding. “The benefit is, you’re in a community where everyone identifies with amplifying women’s voices,” says Amy Nelson, founder of The Riveter. In contrast, co-gender sites such as WeWork and Industrious can feel like large, noisy coffee shops rather than nurturing spaces for collaboration, Nelson says. Visits to such facilities and examinations of promotional material confirm that while many offer social events, such as happy hours, they do not always offer programming geared toward business development. 3 While many sponsor free lunch-and- learn programs, they are often on subjects such as home buying and financial planning, and are led by other members who are looking to cultivate new clients. (A WeWork spokesman declined to comment on these issues.) The Wing, The Riveter, Hera Hub and other spaces for women are filling a gap in the market, their founders say. Before they opened, there wasn’t a single woman co-founder or board member at the three largest U.S. co-working companies, WeWork, Industrious or Rocketspace. 4 One issue that these female-oriented co-working spaces have had to handle is whether to be exclusively for women. The Riveter and Hera Hub welcomed male members from the outset. The Wing did not, and last year the New York City Commission on Human Rights opened an investigation into whether The Wing’s policy to not allow men to join as members or visit as guests is discriminatory. 5 When The Wing opened in Washington, a would-be patron named James E. Pietrangelo filed a $12 million gender discrimination lawsuit against the facility in June 2018 after he said he was told he would be denied entry because he was a man. 6 Soon after that suit was filed, The Wing’s founders changed the membership rules to allow men. 7 The Wing did not respond to requests for comment on the reason for the change in policy. Founders Inspired by Suffrage Clubs Audrey Gelman and her business partner, Lauren Kassan, say their inspiration for The Wing came from the 19th-century women’s clubs that were popular during the suffrage movement and offered a safe environment for women to gather. “While our concerns are different now, we felt like there was still a place for those kinds of spaces,” Gelman said. 8 “And our vision became to resurrect them for modern women.” 9 Founders of these spaces say women need co-working sites created and built by women because women work together differently than men do. Co-working spaces for women typically have more tables and sitting areas geared toward collaboration. The Wing, for instance, offers a variety of sitting areas that feature velvet couches and cozy chairs, in rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, with hanging plants. The library features books written by women about women, organized by the colors of their book jackets to create a rainbow effect on the shelves. While there are a few quiet rooms at The Wing, most of the space is geared toward collaboration. The Riveter and Hera Hub are similar. In comparison, WeWork is 90 percent offices with just a few collaboration tables, The Riveter’s Nelson says. “Women interact differently, and want to collaborate and talk more,” she says. Kate Viggiano Janich and Amy Dagliano, co-founders of Rowan Tree, a women’s co-working space in the Washington suburb of Herndon, Va., say they asked local women what they wanted in a site.