The What Women To The Rescue

The What Women is our private forum on Facebook, which is now 23,000+ members strong (with 35k total throughout our 7 topical and metro groups).

For those of you who are new here, I'm Gina Pell, Content Chief of The What, which started as a weekly culture and lifestyle newsletter and has grown into a deeply engaged community of wise, supportive women who lift each other up daily and happily share resources, solutions, and suggestions of what works and what's good.

My co-founder Amy Parker and I started our private Fb group when we were feeling lost and a little hopeless. We had been running our indie media company for a year (our third since 2000) and we were struggling. Things that used to come easy to us like sponsorship revenue was hard to come by. Our newsletter was an outgoing message that we sent into the digital void. We knew people read it but we didn't know what they were thinking.

We started THE WHAT with the intention to connect, engage, and inform women but when we measured ourselves against our mission we were only hitting 1 out of 3. We were not engaging or connecting anybody. So, we decided to start The What Women on Fb by adding a few close friends and readers. Our initial members voted on a name, The What Women, and we kicked off our first discussion with a provocative post asking about how women found pleasure aside from sex. The group not only started to percolate but membership swelled from a hundred to a thousand within a few hours.

Since the inception of this group we have shaped it with our members. We asked if we should include men and the response was a resounding No. We set rules of civility, kindness, and empathy. We have grown slowly friend by friend, which explains the love and openness we feel in the group. We hand-approve every person and post not because we're elitist but to protect our members from bots, imposters, constant sales pitches, pouncers, and offensive content. Amy and I do this because we love what we've all created and we want to maintain the highest level of recommendations, respect, and reciprocity.

If you identify as a woman, we hope you visit us when you're feeling low, high, or simply curious. We're all here to help each other figure it out because nobody has all the answers. Thank you for helping us to create a safe place with such value and wisdom. And for helping us grow friend-by-glorious-friend.

We will always keep our free forums because they bring us such joy but if you have greater professional needs, consider joining The What Alliance is an investment for sure but if we give this much value for free imagine what the paid experience will be?