Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success. I'm Ashley Nontight.

This time, maybe you've noticed there are a lot of women's conferences out there lately. They're popping up everywhere, advertising empowerment, inspiration, and not just for women nearing the top.

What about your average consumer who's like watching Kim Kardashian or has like no clue as to what

even empowerment means and what feminism is or why it matters to them? So that's, my goal is really

to set out to create the world's most accessible women's conference. But are these events

actually changing anything for women?

They're really based on this philosophy of you can just, you know, work to improve yourself,

make yourself better, smarter, stronger, you look better. But the fact is, as long as women are

just sort of fighting these little solo battles, I don't think a lot is going to change.

Coming up, we take a look at the growing business of women's conferences

and whether they're anything more than a tonic.

Sheila Colhatkar is a staff writer for the New Yorker. We met a bit earlier this summer when she was still at Business Week. And earlier this year, she wrote a piece for that magazine that articulated so many things I'd been thinking about women's conferences, but hadn't quite been able to put into words. I asked Sheila how she came to this topic in the first place.

I noticed over the last couple of years that I would get invitations to these women's

conferences. It seemed to happen every month. It was women's empowerment, women in innovation,

women in science, women in STEM, the glass ceiling. You know, there were dozens of them. And I was intrigued. And of course,

I'm interested in women's issues naturally, and it's something I write about. So I started to go.

And one of the first things I noticed was the way a lot of the women who are up on the stage look.

They are very, very glamorous, most of them. I don't want to generalize,

but this was the real strong point that, you know, I came away with. They had, they were often

wearing these very sort of stylish little skirts and dresses. They had these crazy high heels on.

I'm not a person who can really walk very well in high heels,

although I think they look really great, but I wondered, they're all up there in these stiletto heels

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