The Wing staffers are doing a ‘digital walkout’ until their demands are met

Emma HinchliffeBy Emma HinchliffeMost Powerful Women Editor
Emma HinchliffeMost Powerful Women Editor

Emma Hinchliffe is Fortune’s Most Powerful Women editor, overseeing editorial for the longstanding franchise. As a senior writer at Fortune, Emma has covered women in business and gender-lens news across business, politics, and culture. She is the lead author of the Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter (formerly the Broadsheet), Fortune’s daily missive for and about the women leading the business world.

Staffers for women’s coworking space The Wing submitted a list of demands to company leadership following the resignation of Audrey Gelman as CEO of the startup she cofounded.

“Audrey Gelman’s resignation is not enough,” Wing employees began tweeting Thursday morning. In an accompanying statement, employees said that they were participating in a “digital walkout” on Thursday and had shared demands with leadership to correct the “egregious fact” that “The Wing doesn’t practice the intersectional feminism it preaches.”

The walkout organizers told Fortune that employees would not be returning to work until their three primary demands were met. They did not share the demands with Fortune.

Ninety-three percent of The Wing’s employees, or 67 out of 72 workers, signed the petition, Wing employees said.

Gelman cofounded the women’s coworking space, known for its public embrace of feminism, with chief operating officer Lauren Kassan in 2016. However, former employees—especially women of color who worked in the company’s physical locations—spoke out about what they saw as a disconnect between the company’s branding and its treatment of female workers in New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles in March and April. Pieces of the criticism focused on Gelman’s leadership in particular, but employees are now saying that The Wing’s problems go deeper than her spot in the C-suite.

Employees organizing The Wing’s Thursday walkout said they were “frustrated and saddened by the incompetence and lack of accountability demonstrated time and time again by The Wing’s leadership,” according to a statement shared with Fortune.

“Leadership decisions have disproportionately failed and continue to fail people of color at The Wing,” the group added. “Public perception of The Wing is at an all-time low—and rightfully so.”

Gelman’s role as CEO will be taken over by a new “Office of the CEO” made up of Kassan, senior vice president of operations Ashley Peterson, and senior vice president of marketing Celestine Maddy.

See who made the 2025 Fortune Most Powerful Women list. The definitive ranking of the women at the top of the global business world tells us both who wields power today and who is poised to climb even higher tomorrow.