On telling stories, embarking on journeys, and breaking biases

It’s been a great week here at Tech in Asia as we commemorate International Women’s Day. Over the last five days, we rolled out a slate of content celebrating the women founders and leaders in Southeast Asia’s tech and startup ecosystem, highlighting their stories and perspectives.

This is the second year that I’ve led this campaign, and a few people have asked me why I decided to do it again. There are many reasons, but one thing stands out to me: For all the achievements the world has made around gender equality since International Women’s Day was first officially declared nearly 100 years ago, we’re still not quite there yet.

What can Tech in Asia do as a media company? As our COO Maria Li put it when she kicked off the campaign on Monday with a list of 100+ women in power in Southeast Asia, representation matters.

We need to create avenues for women to advance and be seen as leaders. We need to highlight their journeys and experiences. We need to break stereotypes by spotlighting those who have overcome the barriers in their way. We need to tell the stories of amazing female leaders to inspire a new generation of women.

Telling stories and breaking biases

As part of this year’s campaign, we decided to embark on quite an ambitious project: a survey of Southeast Asia’s female founders. As an organization that deeply believes in the value of storytelling, we wanted to look beyond the numbers to really try and paint a picture of what it’s like to be a female founder in the region – the highs, lows and everything in-between.

I’ll be honest – it wasn’t an easy project to execute, but the final result was well worth it. While it’s still a little early to tell how the piece will do in terms of views or conversions or people’s reception, I’m incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished.

Above all else, this project has been incredibly inspiring. Aside from looking through and analyzing survey responses from nearly 60 female founders in Southeast Asia, I also sat down with seven founders to gain more insights into their entrepreneurial journeys.

It was an eye-opener for me, as these founders spoke very candidly about the road they’ve taken and the hurdles they’ve had to overcome in order to get to where they are. We spun off three of those interviews into longer QuickBytes profiles, giving our readers a closer look at their stories:

• QuickBytes: Breaking through barriers with Tessa Wijaya, Xendit’s COO
• QuickBytes: Changing the edfintech game with Carmina Bayombong, InvestEd’s CEO
• QuickBytes: Breaking new ground with Sandhya Sriram, Shiok Meats’ group CEO

We also put together a network graph of the women founders and leaders behind Southeast Asia’s top-funded companies., and ran a series of videos and articles alongside Globalization Partners, Grab, and Infobip, featuring even more awesome women leaders in tech:

• 6 Questions with Globalization Partners’ Jess Dodge
• 6 Questions with Grab’s Serene Ow
• 6 Questions with Grab’s Nanda Prins
• 20 years in tech: how Infobip’s regional manager fell in love with the industry