Women’s Conferences Just Keep Evolving

With their mix of networking, community-building, and partnership and mentorship opportunities, women’s events are attracting thousands of attendees and millions of sponsorship dollars.

Two major events, Forbes’ Power Women's Summit and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women (MPW) Summit, grew out of magazine rankings — Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful Women and Fortune's 100 Most Powerful Women in Business rankings.  

Started in 1998, Fortune’s MPW is a global community of 300 C-suite women leaders. For a $14,500 annual membership fee, the invite-only series of events includes the annual summit, to be held October 12-14 at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara in Santa Barbara. Previous years’ speakers have included Melinda French Gates, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Barack Obama, and Martha Stewart.

“One thing we always say about MPW is that it’s a business conference that just happens to be for women, rather than a women’s conference,” said Ellie Austin, editorial director. “We talk about the business issues of the day and there happen to be only women in the room, because right now we do not have parity across senior leadership in the Fortune 500 and beyond.”

A regional model is behind the success of Conferences for Women, a network of women's conferences in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California. The last Massachusetts conference attracted 11,000 attendees at $445 a ticket, and the company generated $6.01 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025, including $2.7 million from sponsorships. Among the speakers were American gymnast Simone Biles, and political and cultural commentator and author David Brooks.  

Tip of the Iceberg

There are women’s events in most industries, and for every level of attendee — from forums for women in private equity, to health and wellness summits, to travel leaders' conferences. Recent years have seen significant growth in technology, finance, and healthcare, with major companies like Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Pfizer either sponsoring activations or holding their own events.

The Grace Hopper Celebration, founded in 1994 and organized by the nonprofit AnitaB.org, is widely known among women in tech. (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was one of the first women to receive a doctorate degree in mathematics.) The 2025 event in Chicago brought together more than 25,000 women and non-binary individuals in technology, with sponsors including Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Adobe, and Apple. There were more than 600 speakers, a career expo, and networking opportunities. The 2026 event will be held October 27–30 in Anaheim, California, with tickets starting at $1,099 and a speaker lineup including New York Times best-selling author Kara Swisher and futurist and founder of the WAYE tech education initiative, Sínead Bovell.

Many events are seizing upon the opportunity for expansion. Women Leading Travel (which was acquired by Skift in 2025) has seen its main event grow from 100 to more than 350 women. This year’s conference is planned for June 8-10 at The Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans and features some of the top women leaders in travel, including Carnival Cruises’ President Christine Duffy, alongside Olympian keynoter Marion Jones.

The event has grown carefully and with intention, said Hannah DeMaio, vice-president and co-founder. “We could have scaled faster. But this event lives or dies by the quality of the room, and we’ve never been willing to sacrifice that. Every attendee is vetted and every seat matters.”

International Growth

The next step for Women Leading Travel is to expand internationally, which began this year with their inaugural international event, a January luncheon in London, followed by the first-ever Asia Global Leadership Exchange in Bangkok in April. On the agenda are inaugural events in the Middle East (Abu Dhabi) and Canada (Montreal).  

“The expansion is intentionally being built region by region and ensuring that we are entering each region where they are in their career and where they are culturally,” said DeMaio. 

For Fortune, the MPW event had previously been held in Europe and Canada pre-Covid, when their international events were put on pause. In May of 2025, MPW re-entered the global platform with an inaugural Middle East Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with plans to add events in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.

Intimacy and Exclusivity

While networking is a major reason for attending women’s conferences, the formula changes when you are bringing together the highest cohort of women executives.

“Our job is to bring these women together in environments that they would never otherwise experience,” said Austin. April saw an intimate gathering of 25 senior tech executives at Gloria Steinem’s Manhattan brownstone to discuss how AI is impacting leadership and society — as Austin described it: "an experience that money can’t buy." 

Even though its events are large, Conferences for Women's organizers create “micro-communties” that provide more intimate opportunities to network by breaking attendees out into communities, such as women in STEM, emerging leaders, multicultural professionals, and LGBTQ+ communities. Many events include mentoring circles, one-on-one coaching, and speaker meet-and-greets.

DeMaio shares that same commitment to exclusivity. “We are intentionally non-commercial. There’s no sales floor, no sponsor pitches disguised as content. What that creates is a rare environment of trust.”