Making systematic and sustainable change: Highlights from my e27 interview

I had the opportunity to speak with Mili Semlani from e27 recently on women in tech. It was a thought-provoking experience, and I thought I’d pen here some of the highlights from our conversation, so we can have a broader discussion within the LinkedIn community.  

According to McKinsey Global Institute’s research, there are only 30 women for every 100 men in leadership positions on average, despite the former making up around half of the graduates in many ASEAN countries. The 2018 State of Southeast Asian Tech report by Slush Singapore and Monk’s Hill Ventures further illustrated the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions at both tech startups and venture capital firms - 40 percent of respondents worked in organizations with all-male leadership. There are definitely opportunities for us to step up and do more. 

Google’s mission since our founding is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful to everyone; the keyword here is everyone. While the Internet is more affordable and accessible today, it is not gender-equitable. According to our research with the Next Billion Users, women face four key challenges with the Internet - access, agency constraints, privacy and safety. We have since evolved many of our products to better meet the needs of these new internet users who are coming online, and will continue to do so. An example is Google Go which doesn’t come with browsing history; this is particularly important in countries where women’s devices tend to be shared or monitored, requiring them to delete searches after browsing. 

We’re also far less likely to achieve our mission as a company unless we have a workforce that is more reflective of our users who come from all over the world. This is why we have started publishing our hiring data in our Diversity Annual Report. Our 2019 report shows that we are making progress - the percentage of women in leadership globally in Google has increased from 20.8% to 26.1% (+5.8%) over the last five years. But what I really appreciate about this transparency is it gives us the ability to see that systematic change can be sustainable change. It’s progress, but we know that data powers that progress. We have introduced initiatives to support female Googlers including our flagship Women’s Leadership Summit which gathers SVPs, VPs and Directors to have candid discussions on product and business vision, diversity and inclusion, while creating networking opportunities.

 During my chat with Mili, I talked about what we can do as a community to create opportunities to educate and empower women. These initiatives include WomenWill, which is available in 47 countries globally, and has helped female business owners, including the founder of Reaching Out Teahouse in Vietnam, to make the most of technology to build skills, get inspired and connect with each other. The #IamRemarkable workshops is another project I’m incredibly proud of - it helps women realise and say out loud that they are remarkable and what is remarkable about them. I am so happy to hear that we have accelerated the career progression of 100,000 women in more than 100 countries since its launch.

In the Philippines, the Digiskarteng Pinay initiative uses YouTube as a platform to empower Filipino women by offering them informative videos on family nutrition, financial literacy, beauty and fashion, and coding skills.

We have seen increasing participation in these programs, and we are going to keep at it, because we know that systematic change is sustainable change.

Beyond what others can provide for us, I highly encourage women to take steps in owning the opportunities too. Mili asked me for a couple of tips for female professionals, and here are my thoughts. I’d love to hear some of your tips too. Write to me or feel free to comment in this article! 

Write your story

I was inspired by a friend and a colleague of mine who was interviewing for a director role a number of years ago. There was a request for all applicants to write an essay and she chose to write to the President of the company at the time about what the team had accomplished under her leadership five years out. This letter subsequently also guided her in the next few years after getting the role on what she set out to accomplish. 

I encourage everyone to write an open honest letter to themselves and use it as a guide to check in if we are doing what we have set out to do. 

Stay put

This may sound contradictory to what we know about career mobility to achieve success. But what I think can happen sometimes is that we become so focused on “What should I be doing next” that we don’t take the time to learn and absorb everything we can in our current role. We may also end up not taking the time to put our best forward so that we develop a track record of high performance. 

So my second tip is stay put and do a good job.

Be wary of success

This is just like the old adage of “what got you here won’t get you there”. The first time that I truly experienced this was at an interview with a vice president that I have a lot of respect for and who was familiar with some of my work. He asked me for my perspective on restructuring a particular project. I started by answering what I had done, of which some of it was familiar to him. His reply to me then was “I’m familiar with that. Tell me what you’re going to do.”

It’s this forward-looking view that had me thinking and reminded of an article by McKinsey that I’ve read - context is a critical component of successful leadership. A brilliant leader in one situation does not necessarily perform well in another. This can also be extended to how we think about moving to another role or learning something new. 

Actor Denzel Washington once said, “ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship” which resonated with me. It serves as a reminder to be open to opportunities, take creative risks, and more importantly, chase our butterflies. Go for what is going to give you the butterflies, embrace the opportunity to learn, stretch and grow.

In my parting comment at the end of the interview, I closed off by saying that men and women bring different perspectives to the table, and those different perspectives are valuable. It’s this diversity of different perspectives that makes us better and stronger. Let us all have the courage to build diverse teams ourselves, empower and give back in our own ways, while continuing to have this conversation. We are all in this together. 

To read the interview, click here.