Action, reflection, and insight from International Women’s Day

Dear reader,

I’m Stefanie, one of the writers on the Tech in Asia Studios team. Beyond being a writer, I am also a content strategist, a producer of newsletters, a moderator of panels, and the person at the helm of Tech in Asia’s 2025 International Women’s Day (IWD) campaign.

The theme for this year’s IWD is “Accelerate Action.” When we were planning what our 2025 campaign would look like, I spent a lot of time contemplating what this theme meant for us as a company. How exactly could we accelerate action? What does it mean to do so? What kind of impact do we want to have?

That’s me, in blue, moderating an amazing panel we had on women in tech at last year’s Tech in Asia Conference in Jakarta / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

I was also mulling over potential content formats and approaches we could take this year. IWD is often a time of experimentation for us, and previous years have seen the team push its creative boundaries. We’ve produced a three-part mockumentary, run a social experiment, and conducted an in-depth survey, among other fun projects.

With all these in mind, we decided to tackle this year’s IWD campaign from two different angles.

First, as a media company, what action can we take to support women in our ecosystem? The most obvious is to ensure that women are represented on our platform. We strive for this every day, in all that we do, but within the context of this year’s campaign, this meant:

• Updating our tracker of the female founders and leaders at Southeast Asia’s top-funded tech companies – this year’s list saw a record 66 names, the highest since we started tracking this data in 2022.
• Featuring notable women in our regional tech ecosystem through a dedicated social media campaign, where they shared advice to a new generation of women and reflected on their personal experiences.

Just some of the insights from the lineup of amazing women featured in our social media campaign. Head over to our socials (FB, IG, LI, X) to see more!

To take this a step further, we wanted to make sure that we gave women in our ecosystem a platform. We’ve profiled many of Southeast Asia’s female founders and leaders through our articles, videos, and events, but this year, we wanted to hear from them directly. Through writing letters to their younger selves, we aimed to encourage reflection on the experiences that have shaped these women and create an avenue to share advice and guidance in a more candid and honest manner.

We were honored to feature letters from three amazing leaders in the ecosystem:

• Our COO, Maria Li, who made the leap from corporate to startup and never looked back
• Square Peg partner Piruze Sabuncu, whose career has spanned roles from across the globe
• Serial entrepreneur Grace Sai, who is dedicating her life to tackling climate change

(These letters turned out to be a rather timely venture. Perhaps I have a prophetic gift, as while we were working on these letters, the “I met my younger self for coffee” trend was going viral on social media, especially on TikTok.)