Stop Fixing the System

Rene Huey-Lipton spent decades trying to earn a place in an economy that was never designed for her. Now she's drawing up blueprints for one that is.

I’m going to tell you something that took me far too long to figure out. The system was never broken. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do.

For decades, I did everything I was supposed to do. I leaned in. I code-switched. I mentored. I sat on the panels and signed up for the leadership development cohorts and applauded when a new diversity initiative was announced. I told myself the same story most ambitious women do: if I just work a little harder, prove myself a little more convincingly, stay in the game a little longer, the system will eventually recognize my value.

It didn’t. Not because I wasn’t good enough. But because the system wasn't designed to measure what I brought to the table. It was measuring how well I performed someone else’s version of success.

That realization — slow, painful, and then all at once — is what eventually became the Women’s Economy.

The Moment It Clicked

I wish I could point to one dramatic catalyst, one meeting or a single slight that cracked the whole thing open. But it wasn’t like that. It was cumulative. It was watching brilliant women get passed over for funding while mediocre pitches from men sailed through. It was sitting in rooms where the expertise of every woman present was subtly, almost cheerfully, discounted. It was hearing, for the thousandth time, that the pipeline was the problem, that women just needed more confidence, more training, more patience.

At some point I stopped being angry at the individual injustices and started being curious about the architecture. Why did these patterns keep repeating? Why, after all the programs and pledges and progress reports, were women still receiving a fraction of venture funding? Why were we still fighting for pay equity that had been promised decades ago? Why did every hard-won gain feel so precarious?

The answer, once I saw it, was disarmingly simple: we were trying to renovate a house that had been built without us in the blueprints. The foundation, the load-bearing walls, the entire structure—all of it was designed around a different default human. We could repaint the rooms and rearrange the furniture, but the architecture would always work against us. Incremental reform was never going to be enough, because the system wasn’t failing. It was performing exactly as intended.

So I asked myself a different question. What if we stopped trying to fix their house and started building our own?

What the Women’s Economy Actually Is

The Women’s Economy — what I call WE — is not a nonprofit initiative. It’s not a networking group or a feel-good campaign. It’s a blueprint for a parallel economic ecosystem: an interconnected network of women-led businesses that are each other’s customers, suppliers, investors, and talent pipelines. The goal isn’t to create isolated success stories inside the existing system. It’s to build enough internal gravity that our economy becomes self-sustaining.

Think about it this way. Every thriving economic community in history—immigrant enclaves, industry clusters, cooperative networks—built power the same way: by circulating resources internally before sending them outward. A dollar that changes hands five times within a community creates five times the value of one that leaves immediately. That’s not theory. That’s how economies work. And women, despite controlling trillions in consumer spending, have never organized our economic power this deliberately.

The framework I’ve laid out has five phases. It starts with connecting existing financial infrastructure — women-led investment funds, community lending circles, credit unions designed around the actual patterns of our lives and businesses. There are a million lists out there in communities, at female-focused non-profits, in my computer of women owned businesses. Let’s combine them and codify it. 

From there it moves to establishing anchor institutions in every essential sector, so we’re not perpetually dependent on the old system for banking, legal services, healthcare, technology, or any other critical need. It includes a culture and knowledge layer — mentorship pipelines, shared resource cooperatives, education redesigned to teach women how to build their own systems, not survive someone else’s. It builds toward internal circulation of wealth, where every dollar moves through the ecosystem multiple times before it exits. And ultimately it generates political and institutional power, because economic coalitions shape policy far more effectively than advocacy alone.

None of this is utopian. Every single element has precedent. What’s new is applying these proven models at scale, specifically and deliberately, as a women-led economic movement.

Why Now, Why This, Why Us

I’ve been asked — by well-meaning people and skeptical ones alike — why I think this moment is different. Haven’t women been talking about economic empowerment for generations? What makes this more than another manifesto gathering dust on a shelf?

Here is what I believe has changed. We've run the experiment. We've spent fifty years testing the hypothesis that if women participate in the existing system energetically enough, the system will accommodate us. The results are in.

In 2024, all-female founding teams received just 2.3 percent of global venture capital—$6.7 billion out of $289 billion—and at the current rate of change, we won't reach funding parity until 2065.

The wage gap has not just stalled, it's moving backward—women earned 83 cents on the dollar in 2024, essentially unchanged since 2019, and for the first time in over sixty years the gap widened two years in a row. For Black women, it's 65 cents. For Latinas, 58 cents.

Women hold just 11 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions—and only two of those 55 women are Black. The leadership pipeline still leaks women at every transition point.

We have more data than any generation before us to confirm what our instincts always told us: the system is not going to reform itself, because it is working exactly as designed. At the same time, women today have more economic power, more professional expertise, and more entrepreneurial energy than at any point in history. We’re not starting from nothing. We’re starting from a position of enormous unrealized strength. What we’ve lacked isn’t talent or capital or ambition. What we’ve lacked is a shared architecture — a deliberate structure for channeling all of that power toward each other instead of scattering it into a system that absorbs our contributions without returning commensurate value.

And if we’re honest about who has been doing this work the longest, it’s Black women. Black women have been building cooperative economies, mutual aid networks, and community-sustaining businesses since long before anyone gave it a name. From lending circles to kitchen-table enterprises to the backbone of every civil rights movement this country has seen, Black women wrote the playbook for building power outside a system that refused to include them. The Women’s Economy doesn’t just benefit from that legacy — it is built on it.

That’s what the Women's Economy provides. Not a single organization to join, but a framework anyone can act on. A business owner can audit her supply chain and start shifting spend to women-led vendors. A consumer can take what I call the 30-Day Shift. Apply one simple filter to every purchase: is there a woman-led alternative? A connector can start mapping her local ecosystem and building the bridges between women-led businesses who don’t yet know each other. None of these actions require permission. All of them generate momentum.

What I Want Women of a Certain Age to Know

I’m writing this for a readership that doesn’t need to be told the system wasn’t built for them. You’ve lived it. You’ve felt it in the meeting that should have been your promotion, in the funding round that went to someone less qualified, in the thousand small moments where you contorted yourself to fit a mold that was never your shape.

What I want you to hear is this: that experience is not a wound. It’s an education. Every woman who has navigated the old system and come out the other side is carrying hard-won expertise, a reputation built on real work, and a Rolodex full of other women who’ve done the same. You are not behind. You are exactly the ones the Women’s Economy needs. Because we’re not starting from scratch. We’re starting from us.

The most powerful thing we can do at this stage of our careers is to stop trying to reform a system that will outlast our patience, and start redirecting our energy toward the women around us. Invest in a woman’s business. Refer a woman-led firm. Mentor not with advice alone, but with contracts and introductions. Move your money to a financial institution that circulates capital within the community. These are not gestures. They’re economic acts. And collectively, they’re the foundation of something the old system never anticipated: an economy that doesn’t require our exclusion.

The Invitation

I called this a manifesto when I first wrote it down, but that word can feel combative, and I want to be clear: this is not a document of anger. Anger is warranted — but anger is fuel, not architecture. What I’ve tried to build is something constructive. A blueprint. A set of concrete steps that any woman, anywhere, can begin taking today.

You don’t need a title. You don’t need a credential. You don’t need a seat at a table that was never built for you. You need the clarity to see the game for what it is, the courage to stop playing it on their terms, and the commitment to build with the women around you.

Stop fixing their system. Let's build ours. That’s the whole idea. And it starts with us.

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Rene Huey-Lipton is the creator of WE: The Women’s Economy Blueprint, and the DAME Leadership Model (Daring Authenticity. Meaningful Existence.). She'll be leading a discussion of the Women's Economy on March 11, 2026. Register here. And check out her Substack, I Was Thinking The Other Day.

Images:

Paintings by Victor Dubreuil, known for his trompe l’oeil images of currency.

Courtesy of the Public Domain Review.