A decade ago, Kathleen Carey, then a senior vice president at GE Capital Real Estate, was determined to conduct what she referred to as an “informal, unconventional survey” of friends. They were all in primarily senior positions in the commercial real estate industry. Carey, who later served as president and chief executive officer of the ULI Foundation, wanted to find out if there was a need for an organization that would focus on promoting women into leadership roles within the industry.

“I just started calling people I knew from ULI and asking them, ‘Do you think we still need this? or has the need dissipated?’” she recalls. “‘Is everything great? Do people get the leadership positions that they want regardless of gender or any other orientation?’ They started to laugh at me and said, ‘Oh no. It’s not over. There’s still a long way to go here.’”

There was a consensus among the men and women whom Carey polled that the struggle was not over yet and that a need also existed for a group to advocate for women both at ULI and in the commercial real estate industry as a whole. From that beginning, the ULI Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) was born.

Carey, joined by friends and colleagues, met to craft WLI’s mission statement that would “precisely articulate what this group was going to be about and what we hoped to achieve that would endure,” she says.

Since then, the number of women in ULI has more than doubled. It has risen from 20 percent of the Institute’s nearly 28,000 members to more than 13,000 women members, or 29 percent of the 45,000 total members. Carey says the organization has “just exploded beyond my wildest imagination.”

Ellen Klasson, chair of the WLI Executive Committee and managing director at Terra Search Partners, says the goal is for that number to grow exponentially. Klasson says the mission of WLI is now just as important as ever.

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