Belonging Is a Retention Strategy – and Most Tech Companies Miss It

01 /The Concept

The New Club is a community built around a simple tagline: "Find belonging in a new way." Belonging to what?

It's a professional community for women in engineering and technical roles – occupations that have historically skewed male. "Engineering" in the broad sense used here extends beyond civil and mechanical engineers to include software developers, data scientists, and tech specialists of all kinds.

The New Club's primary focus is software engineers and developers working at both large tech companies and early-stage startups.

The community operates across online and offline channels. In-person, there are hackathons, meetups, and events. Some programming is online-only. Members also get access to a Slack group that's closed to non-members.

The core purpose is career growth. On top of general events, the club offers:

- A mentorship program pairing experienced members with early-career professionals

- Individual coaching sessions led by invited experts

- Direct introductions to founders and hiring leads at compelling startups – the kind of warm referral that actually moves the needle

The community launched in 2023 but has already attracted members from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenAI, Nvidia, Stripe, Airtable, and many others.

Membership is intended to be paid, but The New Club is still onboarding founding members at no charge. Add-on services – coaching, select events – are paid even for founding members.

Notably, The New Club is actively recruiting corporate members: companies that want the community to help their female technical employees advance. That's a meaningful second revenue stream in the making.

The startup has raised $3.1M in its first round.

02 /Why It Matters

Women's professional communities are gaining real momentum as a category.

Chief – [covered previously](/review/klub-na-milliard) – built a community for women in executive roles, raised $140M at a $1 billion valuation. Athena Alliance ([covered here](/review/pomogaj-tem-kto-mozhet-za-jeto-horosho-platit)) serves both current and aspiring women leaders, with membership priced at $2,500–$9,000/year – and has raised $3M. Code First Girls ([covered here](/review/zhirnyj-kusok-rynka-obrazovanija)) started with coding bootcamps for women and has evolved into a full community with mentorship, coaching, and events – raising £4.5M. Ellevest ([covered here](/review/samaya-bolshaya-nisha)) focuses on women's financial goals including investing, now managing $2B in member assets and having raised $153.4M.

Within the tech labor market, the numbers are stark. Women make up about 23% of the technical workforce overall – 25% at smaller companies (10–300 employees) and only 22% at enterprises above 5,000 people. Narrow the lens specifically to software developers, and women represent just 5.17% of the field, with men accounting for over 91%.

What makes this especially striking is that female representation has been growing in virtually every other professional domain – medicine, law, even physics. In computer science, the share of women peaked in the mid-1980s and has declined every decade since. It's not explained by aptitude; the data doesn't support that framing. Something structural happened, and it stuck.

03 /Opportunities

What makes The New Club interesting is that it landed at the intersection of two unrelated trends that have been accelerating simultaneously.

First: a broad cultural shift toward women more actively building careers outside purely domestic roles – with growing demand for institutions that support that ambition.

Second: an acute shortage of software engineers and adjacent technical talent. Demand for developers in the US is growing at roughly twice the rate of demand for workers in other fields. Domestic supply – the pipeline of people graduating with relevant skills – can't keep up.

Some startups are responding by sourcing talent from Africa, Latin America, and other emerging regions and matching it with remote roles at US and European companies. Microverse ([covered here](/review/cherez-soobshhestva-deshevle)) and Propel are examples. But that approach has its own constraints.

The other lever is women – a large, underutilized pool of technical potential that has been systematically discouraged from entering the field for decades, both by cultural frictions and by an industry that hasn't always welcomed them warmly.

The New Club is positioned precisely at this convergence:

- Companies want to solve their pipeline problem by recruiting and retaining more women in tech

- Women in tech want communities and support structures that help them actually advance

That alignment is why corporate membership makes so much sense as a revenue model. Companies get access to a curated talent pipeline and a support system for the female engineers they've already hired. The New Club monetizes both sides.

The opportunity: build analogous communities that ride two converging trends at once – and think carefully about what corporate membership model unlocks the real revenue.