A new initiative, Women’s Collective, has launched to bring together up to 20 women from across the events industry – from CEOs to students, freelancers to venue leads – for quarterly gatherings built on honest conversation rather than networking or polished soundbites.
Women make up more than 70% of the events industry, yet the sector still largely runs on masculine, task-driven norms. Whilst making up a majority of the industry, they hold only 16% of leadership roles.
Women’s Collective has been created by Lucy Eden, founder of Be In Your Element Events, to prove there’s another way – one that makes space for wellbeing and honesty alongside ambition and output.
Eden said: “After twenty years as a senior event manager, I watched brilliant women run themselves into the ground trying to keep pace with an industry built on masculine, task-driven energy. Women’s Collective is proof we don’t have to leave our softness at the door to get the results this industry demands. Rest, honesty and intuition aren’t the opposite of ambition, they’re what make it sustainable.”
The initiative is a deliberate departure from how the industry has long approached this challenge.
Rather than another networking group or panel discussion, Women’s Collective is built around honouring the authentic truth of what it actually feels like to be a woman in this industry. Every decision behind the sessions, from the venue to the way each woman is welcomed through the door, has been made with that intention in mind.
That intention runs through even the smallest details. Sessions take place as a womens circle, rather than around a boardroom table – a deliberate choice to prove the room doesn’t need a boardroom table to get boardroom results. The initiative will take place at St. Ethelburga’s Centre, in Central London.
Each woman receives a single rose on arrival, no branding, no gift bag, simply a reminder to slow down and take her seat. The rose is chosen deliberately: its stem is strong enough to carry thorns, and its bud is soft enough to blossom, and it’s this that Women’s Collective wants every woman in the room to recognise in herself.
Wellbeing runs through every session, helping the room breathe as well as talk, and guarding against the burnout the industry is known for.
Ahead of each gathering, attendees complete a pre-event questionnaire that takes the temperature of what’s alive for them at that moment. The top themes to emerge shape that session’s focus, so the conversation reflects what the room actually needs rather than a fixed agenda.
The room itself stays protected. There is no press presence during the conversation, and nothing said inside, including sensitive material like wellbeing policies or contract clauses, is recorded or shared without permission.
What does travel beyond the room is an Insights Update, produced by Conference News within days of each gathering: an honest, plainly written account of the themes that surfaced and what women are genuinely carrying forward from it.
Every session closes with each woman naming one thing she’ll take back into her own organisation – a conversation, a policy, a different way of working.
Those seeds are carried into the next gathering, which opens by returning to what’s taken root since the last session, before moving into that day’s new theme. It’s this thread running session to session that makes the Collective a continuous circle rather than four standalone meetings a year.
Women’s Collective will meet quarterly, with the first gathering taking place this Autumn.