Alison Moore took over as CEO of Chief, a member organization and community platform for women leaders, in February 2025, having previously served as CEO of Comic Relief US and held executive positions at companies including HBO, NBCUniversal, and Condé Nast. It was a moment of transition for Chief that saw founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan take strategic positions on the board, with Childers now serving as chairman and Kaplan as board director. “They really handed me the baton,” says Moore. “I don't know that I'm necessarily the founder type, but I am a great baton grabber. That's where I shine.”
Moore is steering the organization to support women in senior leadership roles as they assess their futures in post-Covid workplaces, at a time of widespread adoption of AI. To find out more about the impact of the latter amid conversation about the AI gender gap, Chief and The Harris Poll recently produced a report on women and AI, which found that 80% of women surveyed were actively involved in their organizations’ AI strategies, predominantly in AI governance, ethics, and responsible implementation or in roles designing and implementing how humans and AI will work together across an organization. Participants also indicated concerns about risks and the impact of AI on workers. Some 83% of respondents agreed that being cautious about AI adoption is a sign of good leadership rather than resistance to technology, while 73% were concerned that the critical thinking gap would worsen in workforces over the coming three years.
“The 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,” said Moore with the release of the report. “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.”
TIME spoke with Moore about the future of work, DEI rollbacks, and how women’s career paths are changing.
(This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
What are Chief’s goals?
Chief is a platform, but a community too, of senior women leaders. And our mission is amplification of a thriving community of business leaders that follow women around their executive career journey. Our direction of travel is following what we think is going to be the continuing direction of the future of work. [We’re seeing] corporate women who are in transition to either [becoming] a solopreneur or a builder or [in] a corporate environment.
Women's journeys are always changing, and in many ways, if you think about the continuum of women and life journeys, from your 20s to your 30s, 40s, 50s onward, women's cultural journeys change. There's the introduction of children and the lion's share of that responsibility sits with women, still. As you get older, you have not only children, but parents to think about. There’s just this continuum of life that actually are things that, for women, affect the career journey as well, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. So Chief’s purpose and reason to exist is to figure out how we evolve that business model and our service and our support and experience to best be suited to an executive and a senior leader woman's journey today.
You partnered with Harris Poll for a piece of research which seems to suggest that the career ladder is broken for women. Do you think it's broken?
If you think about the ladder, it's not necessarily, in our view, indicative just of the corporate ladder. What it's indicative of is this idea of a linear rung by rung by rung by rung, always fashioned in the direction of up and seniority. Our recognition is that ladder doesn't always function that way, particularly for women. So when I say that the journey gets changed, sometimes it has changed for women—they have children, they step out, they take a power pause, they have other kinds of responsibilities they need to take on, [so] that they might think about a lateral move, as opposed to always continually searching up and I think it's just an outdated mode because 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 this 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?
When you look at women leaders, there's this psychographic profile of curiosity, looking around corners, building resiliency, wanting to fill the toolkit of different experiences. This is why the term multi-hyphen is how we would describe it. All these articles that come out [saying] return to office [RTO] mandates are making women leave corporate, women are quitting work because of menopause. Sorry, they're not all leaving because of menopause. I think there's just another story to it. There are definitely downward pressures on women in companies that are unique to women, and I think that there's truth to that, but there is this undulating piece of optimism that's coming out of this research that we saw around women taking the reins on their own, and that's what I mean by multi-hyphenate women. They're embracing that identity, they're finding value, they're finding success. They're finding great experiences. They're finding what they want in their roles. And so it might be a C-suite. It might be building something new. It might be [investing] in certain companies. It might be taking a power pause. You might be creating avenues for mentorship—and you might be doing all those things all at once. That's sort of the definition of a multi-hyphenate senior leader. And I just think that there is not enough of a story around that. That's what we're looking to support and grow and then figure out how we navigate the future of work together.
Are there particular factors at play today that are making that more possible?
It's the old adage that disruption drives opportunity. Covid was the most recent massive disruption across every vector: work, personal life, health. But if you even look back to the 2008 financial crisis, you start to see women that had to change roles, were pushed out of companies, probably faster than men, because of some of the demographics and the way senior leadership works, it gets very thin at the top.
What you're starting to see now is, coming out of Covid, different decisions and requirements wanting to be made. You had a different rhythm that you were exposed to during Covid and in many ways—that's the RTO pressure, that is the childcare pressure, that is the cohabitation with older families. It's a volatile time for business, even in a vertical perspective. But then you take AI, and you take a red thread between every business line. It doesn't matter what it is, it's going to be disrupted by this. The 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.
You mentioned earlier that women aren't necessarily leaving the workforce because of menopause, but it can, in some ways, affect the way that they are handling their workloads, perhaps around sleeping patterns or other factors. It seems like that's not really a conversation that the corporate world is really ready to have just yet…
Probably not pervasively. I know there are some. We have some enterprise level partnerships with companies who recognize that as a dynamic. I don't know that they would change the five or four day work week because of menopause. I think there are some probably more forward-leaning organizations that are thinking about that. Whether it's menopause or I need more flexibility with childcare, or I just don't want to be working in that same rhythm. I think that's a moment of like, well, let me see what could I augment and change? What's available to me that can still give me growth and meaningful impact and aligns with my values and autonomy. Financial is a key thing there. 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 ops along their subject matter expertise, and in that, find enormous flexibility while still having very senior strategic work at hand.
Are rollbacks in DEI initiatives, in the U.S. particularly, affecting your members and the wider community?
At the beginning of 2025, there was a lot of activity, clearly, and it's definitely a different climate today. I think that's not only germane to women, I think there's a broader thing going on there. As it relates to the Chief membership, and it relates to the companies who sponsor women in Chief, or to the companies that we have larger enterprise relationships with, these companies want professional development. They are still working on professional development. They still believe in leadership as a quality that's important for their senior leaders, particularly [because of] the agility required in these senior leadership roles in these companies. It's taken a quantum leap in the last year. They still understand the value of community strategic support and a network of peers in seniority, but also the diversity in that view, that Chief can bring.
Have you seen any sponsors pulling back from that themselves and not wanting to dedicate budget to it?
No, I would just say more [that] we're having more conversation around it and getting under what it means for them and how we create other spaces of networking opportunities for the Chief women that they have. We [have] a lot of things that we can do within the company, so while there's a membership experience—the coaching, the leadership challenges and opportunities, unpacking the network, all that kind of stuff—there is other opportunity to create learning, development events that benefit a broader [group]. All these women have men that report to them, men that are colleagues and men that are that they report to. In many cases, we can help build support opportunities that are even within the company itself. So we just have a little more flexibility. It's not just plugging somebody into a membership—there's other ways that we can work with companies.
Chief itself has faced some criticism in recent years about not being inclusive enough. Is that something that you've been working on?
Oh, yeah. I was a founding member in 2019 and left in 2022. Our community is very diverse—identities, perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, ideas. I think in the past, much earlier in Chief's journey, there were some gaps in communicating with any woman who had applied to Chief, and the cycle of communication, because it is a vetted network, and frankly, how to handle that level of conversation and communication and transparency. And this was a communication that was rectified a few years ago, and you can see it reflected in the diversity of the membership that we have today. But I think it's a bigger note to remember that inclusivity and transparency go together, and 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. This is not an option, this is a must-have, as much as it is of metrics and goals. 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.
Are there ways that women, whether they're part of the community or more broadly, can be advocating for other women that they work with or who they know within their sectors?
Yeah, Chief is a vetted network, for sure, and there's a level of seniority that's by years of experience. There's several criteria, which is all published on the site, very transparent. There's not this secret curtain or a handshake that people need to understand. But there is that sort of level, and it's really kind of centered on seniority of business experience. From there, what's very interesting is the advocacy or the conversations around mentoring, or how do we bring in pipeline of women? If I'm a Chief member woman at my company, or, [with] some women that I invest in, what is that pipeline? Where are those places and spaces that we could bring these together? Because there are so many women in Chief who are very interested in giving back and very interested in pulling along those beside them, or that perhaps they report to them. So, that's a very important place that we're trying to create small moments for, and figuring out how we do that. And we do that today through some of our members' initiatives. But I'd like to think about that more broadly in the future.
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