Ladies Who Listen is an initiative to celebrate and connect women shaping the future of research. Launched in New York City, it brings together leaders to exchange ideas and foster insightful conversation.

Last week, we gathered leaders from Pinterest, L’Oréal, Mastercard and others to kick off our first ever Ladies Who Listen event. Some attendees build UX research teams inside startups. Some run insights for Fortune 500 companies. A few report to a CMO. A few are the CMO.

The visibility gap

Customer research is a century old. What's changing fast is who's doing it and how. With Listen Labs, AI can now run and synthesize hundreds of interviews in a fraction of the time manual review used to take, without losing rigor, and the people running that work are mostly women.

The last time the research field measured gender at scale:

• 68% of user researchers identified as women (User Interviews, 2021 State of User Research report).

• 50% of Fortune 500 CMO seats were held by women in 2025, down from 53% the year before (Statista).

User research is already majority women but the recognition hasn’t caught up. We built Ladies Who Listen to ensure that women talent is empowered and undeniably visible across industries.

Why a dinner and not a panel

A panel or a speaking session is polished, you say and pitch what is arranged. A dinner for a handful of people gets the real version instead. That's what we strive for, real conversations. Whether you're a researcher, a product manager, an entrepreneur, or a CMO, Ladies Who Listen is for anyone using AI to turn that kind of conversation into research that scales.

Coming to your city next

Listen Labs was founded in San Francisco and grew into New York, where Ladies of Listen held its first dinner. The next dinners retrace that path: San Francisco, then London, with more cities to come as the group grows.

Check our events page for our next Ladies Who Listen dinner.