To a great degree, men hold the high-level positions in corporations and other organizations. While women make up half the populace, only a fraction of that number make it to the top of the corporate ladder. It’s not an issue of talent or education. The real problem is being considered at all for those positions.

Executives aren’t hired by resume, they don’t go through recruiters. They are chosen, personally, by those already at the top. For women to find equal representation among the executive ranks, they must first break into these male-dominated networks, according to Coco Brown, founder and CEO of The Athena Alliance and CEO and principal consultant of Executive Kinections.

To discuss this issue, Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked with Brown during the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference 2016 event.

The missing key

Brown started the conversation by describing The Athena Alliance. It’s an organization of executive women with a vision of women operating at their highest level of impact. In business, that means the boardroom. The organization’s goal is to help women achieve boardroom roles.

Those positions are gated by mostly men. These men have few women in their personal networks, but lots of other men, so they tend to choose men over women when filling executive opportunities. The key is bringing women into the networks.

Breaking into the network

These personal networks are mostly formed by school or corporate alumni groups, where men and women separate into their own circles, Brown said. The only way to bring them together is to make it happen. She proposed two methods.

The first is to bring women onto nonprofit and advisory boards; the Athena Alliance has had great success doing this. These boards are a good way for women to make themselves known to other aspects of the company. The second is to bring men and women together to create mixed networks, building on the overlap between the existing networks.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE