Guru Amar Das Ji organised the growing sangat into twenty-two manjis, seats, each with an appointed head responsible for a region. Women were among those appointed.
Guru Ram Das Ji and Guru Arjan Dev Ji developed this into the masand system: appointed agents who collected the daswandh, the tenth part, from local sangats and brought it to the Guru, and who preached and organised.
It worked. It is how a community spread across northern India was held together and funded, and it built Amritsar, Tarn Taran and the rest.
It then failed. By Guru Gobind Singh Ji's time a number of masands were treating their office as hereditary property and their collections as income. He abolished the system in 1699 and instructed sangats to bring offerings directly.
The abolition of an intermediary clergy in 1699, alongside the creation of the Khalsa, is the second half of the same reform and is much less discussed than the first.
The word masand is still used in Punjabi as an insult.
Women are named in the tradition among those given charge of seats, and the accounts also speak of piris, smaller seats under the manjis. Whether the piris were a separate women's institution or a later reading of the same lists is argued, and the material is thin either way.
Guru Amar Das Ji fixed Baisakhi, Maghi and Diwali as the days the sangats were to come to Goindwal, which gave the network a calendar as well as a shape. Those are still the days Sikh crowds gather, and they were an administrative decision before they were anything else.
The daswandh continues without collectors. It goes into the golak and to institutions directly and no office stands between a Sikh and it. The absence of a paid clergy is not an abstraction about doctrine. It is the consequence of one decision taken about a specific set of men who had made the office pay.