Chief vs Ellevate Network in 2027 — which is right for your career stage?

Direct Answer

Ellevate Network (roughly $40/month, or about $480/year for individual membership; corporate tiers run higher) and Chief ($5,800 to $7,900/year) are not really competitors — they target different career stages and you should never pay for both. Ellevate is a broad-tent professional women's association founded in 1997, scaled by Sallie Krawcheck after her 2013 acquisition of 85 Broads, and now run by majority owner Allyson McDonald.

Chief, founded in 2019 by Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, is an invitation-only network for VP, SVP, and C-suite women. Verdict: if you are early-to-mid career or a director chasing a VP seat, Ellevate is the obvious choice. If you are already a VP+ with budget authority and need a peer board of women who actually understand P&L ownership, Chief earns its price.

Paying $7,900 to network with people two rungs above you is a waste, and paying $480 once you are running a function is beneath the room you should be in.

1. Head-to-Head Breakdown

The two networks share a stated mission — advancing women professionally — and almost nothing else. Founder DNA explains most of the divergence. Sallie Krawcheck came out of Wall Street wealth management at Merrill Lynch and Citi, and she built Ellevate as a democratized, scaled professional association that any working woman could join.

Chief's founders Carolyn Childers (ex-Handy COO) and Lindsay Kaplan (ex-Casper VP Comms) deliberately constructed the opposite: a velvet rope, an application process, and a waitlist that reportedly hit 60,000 names at one point.

The pricing gap — roughly 15x — is the entire story. Ellevate gives you optionality and exposure. Chief gives you a small room with women who have already done the job you are trying to do. Those are different products. Treating them as substitutes is the most common mistake I see in LinkedIn comparison threads.

2. Who Wins for Each Persona

Senior IC or new manager (Salary $90K-$140K): Ellevate, every time. Chief will not let you in, and even if you slipped through, the Core Group dynamic assumes you have direct reports and budget authority. You would be the quiet one in a room full of women debating compensation philosophy and board dynamics — useful to overhear, useless to participate in.

Ellevate Squads are designed for exactly your stage: eight peers, monthly meetings, accountability on a single named career goal. $480 buys real ROI here, and the chapter events double as low-stakes practice for executive presence in a roomful of strangers.

Director chasing VP (Salary $180K-$260K): Still Ellevate, but supplement it. You need volume of conversations, industry exposure, and a sponsor network — not a peer board yet. Chief is premature.

Spend the Chief money on an executive coach instead ($400-$600/hour for 10-12 sessions), pocket the rest, and use Ellevate's chapter events plus targeted LinkedIn outreach for the warm intros that actually convert to job offers. A coach delivers compounding career returns at this stage; a $7,900 membership pin does not.

Newly promoted VP (Salary $280K-$450K): This is the only genuine coin-flip. Chief is engineered for you — the peer board fills the "I cannot talk to my team or my boss about this" gap that VPs hit immediately. But if your company sits in a tight vertical (biotech ops, energy trading, defense contracting), Chief's generalist room may underperform a vertical-specific community.

Try Chief for one year, evaluate honestly.

SVP, C-suite, or Founder ($500K+ comp or equity): Chief earns its $7,900 — assuming you actually attend. The dirty secret is that anecdotally 30%+ of Chief members never consistently show to Core Group. If your calendar cannot accommodate two 90-minute sessions a month plus quarterly events plus the marquee speaker dinners, you are buying a status pin, not a network.

At that point you should buy a paid board seat through Bolster or Athena, join YPO for the multi-industry CEO peer cohort, or fund a personal advisory board of three retired operators at $1,000/month each. All three options will deliver more usable counsel than a Chief membership you cannot attend.

3. The Third Option Nobody Talks About

Here is the unpopular take: for women in tightly defined verticals — RevOps, product marketing, infosec, clinical research, ESG, M&A — a free vertical-specific Slack community plus a self-organized peer board of five women you already trust will smoke both Ellevate and Chief for actual career velocity.

You assemble the room yourself — five women, similar stage, different companies, non-competing — and meet monthly over Zoom or dinner. Cost: $0. Quality of conversation: higher than Chief, because everyone in your DIY board understands your specific function deeply.

Layer in two or three high-signal communities — RevGenius for RevOps, Sharebird for PMM, Lenny's community for PM, On Deck for founders — and you have a stack that costs under $500/year and outperforms a Chief membership for anyone whose career advances through functional depth rather than executive breadth.

Chief sells horizontal connection across functions; sometimes you need vertical density instead. The only people for whom this DIY stack fails are women specifically trying to move sideways into a board seat or a CEO role, where the brand-name room and the curated introductions are the actual product.

FAQ

Is Ellevate still operating in 2027? Yes. Some 2024-2025 commentary suggested Ellevate was winding down, but the network continued under Allyson McDonald's ownership after Krawcheck's exit and remains active. Always confirm current pricing on the join page before assuming the $40/month rate.

Can I expense Chief through my employer? Often yes, especially at companies with leadership development budgets. Frame it as executive education, not networking. Ask before paying out of pocket.

What if I get rejected from Chief? Reapply in 18 months after a title or scope change. The rejection often reflects role profile, not personal merit. In the meantime, Ellevate and a strong DIY peer board cover 80% of the value.

Sources

• Ellevate Network — Wikipedia
• Ellevate Network Membership Benefits
• Chief — Sallie Krawcheck
• Chief vs Ellevate vs WomenCEO comparison — WomenCEO
• CNBC: How the founders of Chief expanded amid the pandemic
• Adweek: Opportunities for women to connect
• Sallie Krawcheck — Institute for Global Affairs
• Ellevate Network announces new CEO