Women Who Cowork is a membership platform for femme-identified coworking space operators around the world.
Our mission is to amplify the coworking movement by providing women with support, resources and mentorship.
Women Who Cowork, Global Coworking Unconference Conference, New York City, USA 2017
Women make up 86% of the world's coworking employees yet only 36% of the coworking spaces are women-owned. Coworking is literally "women's work", yet the barrier to ownership is high for women.
Female coworking founders are struggling to bring their spaces to market, or are being forced to close, because they lack access to funding, support and resources.
We recognized this gender gap and decided we had to create a solution. We envisioned a place where femme identified coworking owners and operators could gather in a supportive community of peers.
In 3 short years Women Who Cowork has grown from a blog post to a thriving community of 750+ femme identified founders and operators across the globe. Our members currently receive support through our community of peers along with individual and group coaching and consulting from us.
We hold retreats, meetups and online events, all designed to foster our growing coworking movement from the unique perspective of being a woman in business.
In early 2019, we launched an online community platform that connects the world to a map of women-owned spaces across the globe and surfaces the women leading those spaces through unique founder profiles. We currently have 114 spaces listed and more are joining every day.
With 19,000 coworking spaces across the globe and more opening every month, the demand is greater than we can support with our current resources.
Women Who Cowork has been bootstrapping for 3 years and we are now fundraising in order to answer the need for increased offerings including:
Web-based resources:
- online forum
- more extensive founder profiles
- support for our map (currently functions slowly)
Business resources
- access to funding
- women-owned certification
- local chapter tool kit and support
Educational programming and workshops:
- financial education
- fundraising
- contract and lease negotiation tactics
- business knowledge and tools that are traditionally not taught to women.
We chose to work with iFundWomen because we believe in the value of women supporting women and because our women are already here, fundraising for their spaces. We want to support them in their efforts to build effective community funding campaigns.
Our founders, Laura Shook Guzman and Iris Kavanagh, have been each working in the coworking movement since 2008 and have a combined 22 years of coworking experience!
Laura, a practicing somatic psychotherapist, opened the first coworking space in Texas and the first wellness-focused coworking space in the world.
Iris was the founding employee of one of the world's most well known original coworking brands and scaled the company from 1-9 locations in 6 years. Since 2015 she has worked as an independent consultant supporting coworking operators in building their operations, communities and hiring and managing their staff.
Together they have taken a Facebook group and blog post meant to inspire and connect women in coworking into a global community serving a combined network of over 125,000 freelancers, entrepreneurs, small business owners and remote workers.
When women are in leadership positions, we reinvest 90% of our earnings back into our communities.
We know that in supporting women space operators, we are supporting grassroots economic development in communities across the globe.
Each woman running a coworking community is supporting each of her members. The members are, in turn, supporting their larger communities. We call this the Women Who Cowork Ripple Effect.
When women succeed, communities succeed.
We thank you for supporting us as we build a movement to support women-owned businesses. When you support a women owned-coworking space, you support her entire community and push the needle forward towards true gender equity in business.
