“It’s not often that entire industries are born,” Crystal Huish, a certified public accountant with an M.B.A. in accounting, echoed. Huish owns Count Cannabis, an accounting firm that specializes in the marijuana industry. With cannabis companies, business models aren’t set yet, Huish said. “It’s an opportunity to break old traditions.”

But this relative gender parity wasn’t always true of this field. Long before states began permitting the use of marijuana for medicinal or recreational purposes, smoking pot was traditionally portrayed in pop culture as a male pastime. Studies suggest men are still more likely than women to consume cannabis. And several of the women I spoke with said the early days of legalization here seemed dominated by aggressive “frat bro” businessmen.

Yet that seems to be shifting with the advent of organizations like Women Grow. Launched in 2014, the group wants to help women both “influence and succeed in” the marijuana market as more states eliminate laws that make selling and smoking illegal. And it wants them to enter the market early, so that women have as much of a say as men about how the post-legalization landscape develops. In the past couple of years, its membership and reach have swelled to more than 30 chapters across the United States.

I met both Foster and Huish at a Women Grow networking event in the trendy and pot-friendly Five Points neighborhood. At this particular meeting—held on the same day some 83 years ago that prohibition unofficially collapsed—dozens of women of all ages and backgrounds gathered to talk about pot-focused philanthropy and to listen to a presentation that suggested women will ultimately lead the cannabis industry. Other Women Grow events have outlined how to launch a company or how to cultivate a client list.

While proponents of pot legalization have for years recognized the importance of getting support from women, female entrepreneurs said they are pushing for more than just advocacy and consumption roles in the marijuana market. They are tired of working in industries where the rules are set—and stacked against them.

Consider a field like finance; Foster felt she had to be willing to work all the time, which made volunteering at her kids’ school or taking them to extracurricular activities difficult. And multiple women said that in their previous careers, there wasn’t necessarily a camaraderie among workers, who were often rewarded for making the most sales or bringing in the most money, not for helping each other. Cannabis, they said, felt like a chance for a clean start.

“I think it’s a chance for women to make the rules,” Foster said. The industry offers its workers more flexibility than something like finance, she said, and there are fewer glass ceilings because everyone is “figuring it out simultaneously.” Perhaps because of their shared experiences in less-accommodating fields, the female leaders in the cannabis industry told me that they tend to be supportive of each other as they navigate what is still a relatively new market.