what’s happening & why it matters.

Why do the board members of regional chapters of the Women’s Jewelry Association (WJA) keep resigning in protest, and what are they objecting to? Let’s discuss.

If you’re also on jewelry social media, you might have witnessed the recent avalanche of resignations from the Women’s Jewelry Association (WJA). The reason behind the movement is important, and we’re going to take a look at the facts of the situation today.

This isn’t my usual sort of post: there won’t be any pictures of jewelry, and if you decide to skip it, that’s okay. But if you’re in the jewelry industry, please consider at least reading the “what happened” section so you know what’s going on.

This article is written from publicly available information, since I am not a WJA member.

What is the Women’s Jewelry Association?

Founded in the 1980’s, the Women’s Jewelry Association (WJA) is a professional organization for women in the jewelry and watch industries. According to their website, the WJA defines its mission as follows:

To support women in the jewelry and watch industries’ advancement and professional development through networking, education, leadership development, and the provision of member services and to be the premier business networking and community-building organization dedicated to enriching and advancing the professional lives of women in the jewelry and watch industries.”

Since its founding, the WJA has seen enormous growth, spreading across the country with the launch of individual chapters in different cities as well as developing mentorship programs, WJA Masterclasses, Jewelry’s Night Out, the WJA Awards for Excellence, and the WJA Jewelry Loupe Project for emerging designers.

I’ve always admired the WJA and believed in its mission. I was a member for several years, and I have been a featured speaker at events for the Philadelphia Chapter and the DC, Maryland, & Virginia WJA Chapter and also attended the WJA Awards for Excellence Gala in the past.

What happened?

During the December 10th, 2024 Annual Membership Meeting, WJA President-Elect Gabrielle Grazi made an end-of-year speech that announced a shift in priorities for WJA.

You can read the entire speech at this link, but here is the relevant section:

We exist to help women thrive and we pride ourselves on building a culture of inclusion and belonging.

In our efforts to support DEI and highlight underrepresented communities in our industry, it was recently brought to our attention and I wish to acknowledge here, today, the many in our industry who have felt excluded the past few years.

In hindsight, our content did not always reflect the complexion of our membership and that of our broader industry. Our sincere efforts to be inclusive created a perception of exclusion by many long standing and founding members of the jewelry community.

We sincerely apologize for this misstep. Everyone is welcome in our community. Every individual is diverse.

As a women’s business organization with a 501 c6 designation, we will be focused on diversity of thought, and not comment or create content around social justice issues.”

I didn’t witness this firsthand because I’m not a WJA member anymore, but it only took a couple of days for murmurings of discontent to reach me.

Then the resignations began.

On January 14, 2025, the entire WJA Chicago board resigned in protest and shared an open letter on the @WJAChicago Instagram account giving their reasons.

You can read the open letter above, but here is a highlight:

As a diverse board composed of women from various cultures, creeds, races, and nationalities, we were deeply disheartened by [Grazi’s] statement and the implications they carry for our organization’s future.

The assertion that WJA’s “sincere efforts to be inclusive created a perception of exclusion” misrepresents the purpose and values of this organization. […]

The commitment to avoid “creating content around social justice issues in the future” contradicts the very foundation of WJA. As the WJA website highlights, founders Toni Lyn Judd and Cindy Geller created this organization to give women a voice in the jewelry industry where there previously was none. That founding principle is inherently tied to social justice.”

The Chicago board resignation sparked conversations all over the industry. The WJA NorCal (Northern California) board soon followed suit, with their mass resignation announced on individual member accounts:

The NorCal board made one final post on their Chapter’s Instagram before their mass resignation: they shared a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about the importance of maintaining hope in the face of worthwhile struggle.

As of January 27, 2025, the board of the San Diego WJA chapter has also resigned. From the @WJASanDeigo Instagram story:

The decision by the 2025 National Board to retain Gabrielle Grazi as President of WJA National after sowing unpreceded division within our membership and instigating dozens of resignations from our local and National leadership following her December 10th statement at our Annual Leadership Meeting has left us unable to effectively support our community members through this association at this time.”

Former San Diego board member Ashley McGinty of Chouette Designs also posted an eloquent statement on her brand’s Instagram further explaining her own objections to the WJA speech (below).

Addendum, January 29, 2025, 6:30 pm: both the WJA Miami and WJA Seattle boards announced hours after this article was published that they are all resigning as well. This brings the total of regional chapter boards that have resigned up to five.

I have added both of their open letters in the slideshow below:

Why it matters

Like the United States as a whole, the jewelry industry stands at a crossroads: will we stand up for our community and work to create a safe, welcoming, inclusive place that fosters the beautiful diversity that makes both our nation and our industry truly great or we will fold under the pressures of prejudice and surrender the fight to make our corner of the world a better place just to keep a few fearful people comfortable?

(Yes, we have reached the part of the article where I stop trying to sound unbiased.)

Whether this shift in policy is coming from individuals within the WJA who are trying to assert their own beliefs on the organization or if it is a deliberate attempt to align the WJA more closely with the rigid, right-wing beliefs of the USA’s new presidential administration, I do not know. But I strongly agree with the Chicago WJA’s open letter when they say that this shift in priority feels contradictory to the very existence of the WJA.

The WJA’s core mission, its stated reason for existing, is to “support women in the jewelry and watch industries’ advancement and professional development through networking, education, leadership development, and the provision of member services.”

The December 10th speech calls the WJA’s past efforts to “support DEI and highlight underrepresented communities in our industry” a “misstep” and states that the WJA will not “not comment or create content around social justice issues” moving forward.

The WJA was founded because women are an underrepresented community in the jewelry industry! The organization has tied itself into a knot where its own president opposes the WJA’s very reason for existing.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Grazi’s statement’s about opposing DEI efforts and no longer commenting on social justice issues hamstrings the WJA’s ability to support members who are facing challenges connected to the fact that they themselves may be part of an underrepresented community.

If the WJA won’t support members facing challenges connected to their status as part of an underrepresented community, they’ve effectively announced that they’re only concerned with problems that affect straight white women – specifically, straight white women who have no disabilities and face no other discrimination of any kind.

How has WJA responded?

The WJA Chicago open letter mentions that WJA National staff “stated that the remarks in question were to address some of Jewish members of WJA’s dissatisfaction with the national board’s lack of response to the events of October 7th and the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

While I’d believe that a fear-based desire to avoid the question of how to publicly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict partly inspired the new policy against social justice content, the idea that this same concern justifies the anti-DEI stance simply makes no sense.

According to a JCK article about the debacle, the WJA has made several internal attempts to pacify this situation: a call between Grazi and the chapter leaders (who then resigned en masse), a statement from Grazi saying her remarks were misunderstood, and a membership email insisting that Grazi’s comments were “hers and hers alone.”

The disavowal would be more convincing if Gabrielle Grazi hadn’t been elevated from President-Elect to active President of the WJA since her December 10th speech.

The membership email also apparently doubled down on the WJA’s new anti-social justice stance, saying “[Grazi] does not feel as though WJA should be making statements or social-media posts about external cultural, political, or social issues that do not directly impact our organization’s mission.”

None of these efforts have stemmed the tide of resignations or provided any explanation to the public, leaving the industry as a whole with no choice but to take Grazi’s remarks at face value and assume that they represent the WJA’s true priorities.

I’ve said Gabrielle Grazi’s name a lot, but I don’t mean to vilify her or place all the responsibility on her shoulders: she gave a bad speech, but she is only one person. The WJA is a vast organization with a 40+ year history and it is their collective responsibility to respond to this situation appropriately.

I’m honestly baffled by the WJA’s continued refusal to make any public statement about all of this. Does the WJA truly not understand how far Grazi’s words have reached, or how hurt and angry people are? With their silence, they’re essentially cosigning the anti-DEI, anti-social justice Dec 10th speech as representative of the organization’s priorities.

What next?

At this point, I think it would take an extremely decisive public statement coupled with substantive action for WJA leadership to have any chance of regaining the faith and goodwill of the public and stem the tide of resignations.

In a January 22, 2025 Instagram story (above), former WJA board member Monica Stephenson made the following statement:

It is important that the current [WJA] Board realizes that recent comments by the incoming President are divisive for many members and Chapter leaders, and not in keeping with WJA’s mission. We do not have to “other” one group who needs support to amplify another.

In order for the WJA to survive, the Board needs to act immediately—and with accountability and empathy—to address the harm done by these statements. I hope that this organization can continue on the path begun 40+ years ago that so many have believed in and worked towards.”

WJA has only begun to feel the effects of this debacle: I have had many conversations with members who haven’t resigned, but are planning to let their WJA memberships expire later this year.

I want to emphasize again that I am not a WJA member – I have no connection to the organization. The fact that friends, acquaintances, and strangers have approached me to discuss these events and ask for advice or clarity on this situation shows how badly people are aching for an actual explanation from the WJA.

I have the utmost respect for every WJA member who has resigned in protest or spoken up publicly about these events. Their actions (and a DM from one particular concerned WJA member) are what inspired me to rearrange my week to write this article.

Such bravery deserves to be documented, and the fact that there are so many people willing to stand up for inclusivity and social justice gives me hope for our industry, even if the WJA as an organization has decided it is no longer interested in changing for the better.

Several of the WJA Chapter board resignation statements mentioned the desire to to build community and support each other in new ways (Like San Diego, above). If the WJA refuses take the necessary steps to turn things around, I’m very interested to see what new, better organization can emerge from its ashes.

I want to hear what you think, my darlings. Have you ever been a WJA member? How do you feel about this shift in the organization’s priorities? I’d love to start a conversation.

If you or someone you know is working on a new organization to help fill the void the the WJA’s undesirable transformation has left behind, please let me know! I’d love to hear about it.

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