We Monetized the Humanity Out of Each Other

There was a time when one person did all of it.

They gave you advice when you were stuck. They helped you set goals when you couldn't see past the next quarter. They walked into rooms you hadn't earned access to yet and said your name out loud. They advocated for you when you weren't there to advocate for yourself.

That was a mentor.

We don't really have those anymore. What we have instead is a tiered system — coaches for the strategy, mentors for the guidance, sponsors for the advocacy. Each role carefully delineated. Each one, increasingly, attached to a price tag.

And we wonder why we feel so alone.

What Men Got for Free

Mentorship, in its original form, was built inside patriarchal structures designed for men.

The deals didn't happen in the conference room. Research interviewing faculty across 16 university medical centers found that nearly all participants — men and women alike — identified the "boys club" as critical to career advancement, with one male physician stating plainly that "big decisions are made on the golf course."

The golf course. The back room. The after-work drinks that women weren't invited to.

Ninety percent of CEOs golf, and only 26% of golfers are women. That's not a coincidence. That's infrastructure — built for a specific kind of person, maintained by familiarity, and disguised as recreation.

Men didn't need to monetize mentorship because it was already embedded in their systems. It happened informally, invisibly, over eighteen holes and a handshake. Nobody charged for it because nobody had to.

Women were locked out of those rooms. So we built our own. And then somewhere along the way, we started charging admission.

How We Split It Apart

Research shows that mentorship alone increases the likelihood of promotion for men — but does not have the same effect for women. That finding should stop you cold.

We've been told that mentorship is the answer. Get a mentor. Find someone who's done it. Learn from them. And women have responded — enthusiastically, faithfully — because we believed in the model.

But women are consistently over-mentored and under-sponsored. We get the advice. We rarely get the advocacy.

The sponsorship gap is structural and self-reinforcing. Ninety-two percent of sponsors cite "perceived potential" as their deciding factor — a subjective standard shaped by familiarity and unconscious bias. Sponsors back people who remind them of themselves. And when most senior leaders are still men, that calculus plays out in predictable ways.

So we responded by naming the gap and productizing the solution. Coaches. Mentors. Sponsors. Each carved out as a distinct offering, a separate engagement, a separate invoice.

What used to live inside one relationship — advice, accountability, goal-setting, and someone willing to put their reputation behind yours — got disaggregated and sold back to us in pieces.

The Community Problem

The same thing happened to community.

Real community is not a membership tier. It is not a Slack channel with a monthly fee. It is not a curated cohort of high-achieving women who paid to be in the same room.

Real community is uncomfortable. It asks something of you on the days you have nothing left to give. It requires you to show up when it's inconvenient, to sit with someone else's hard thing when you're carrying your own, to invest in relationships that don't have an obvious return.

We've replaced that with products. And the products are good — they're well-designed and well-marketed and they meet a real need. But they are not community. They are the simulation of community. And the difference matters more than we're admitting.

In 2023, the Surgeon General declared loneliness a national epidemic. A 2024 poll found that one in three Americans felt lonely.

We are more connected by every measurable infrastructure metric than any generation before us. We have more platforms, more programs, more paid communities, more coaches, more access. And we are lonelier.

That is not a coincidence either.

What We're Actually Doing

When every relationship has a transaction attached to it — when advice costs money, when advocacy is a service, when belonging requires a subscription — we stop relating to each other as people and start relating to each other as products.

That is not a criticism of anyone who charges for their expertise. Charge for your expertise. Charge well. That's a different conversation.

This is about what happens when we take the things that are supposed to be freely given — genuine investment in another person's growth, the willingness to say someone's name in rooms they're not in, the act of belonging to something together — and we put a price on all of it.

We are monetizing the humanity out of each other.

And then we're logging off and feeling empty and wondering what's wrong with us.

Nothing is wrong with you. The system is just optimized for transactions, not for people.

What It Would Look Like Instead

I'm not arguing for a return to some imaginary past where everyone was generous and nothing cost anything. I'm arguing for honesty about what we've built and what it's costing us.

Mentorship that actually works looks like someone in a position of influence deciding that your advancement matters to them — not as a client, not as a revenue stream, but as a person. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that women who advocate for other women and promote diversity in leadership receive lower competency and performance ratings for doing so. Women pay a professional cost for the kind of advocacy we're now selling to each other.

That's the system we're operating in. And naming it is the first step to building something different.

Real community and real mentorship require something that can't be productized: the decision to care about someone when there's nothing immediately in it for you.

That's the hard part. That's also the only part that works.