Letter from the Editor
The coronavirus pandemic has been likened to holding up a mirror—a giant pause that has allowed us to see who we really are. In Japan, staying home has put the spotlight on the immense disparity in domestic work done by men and women, with the latter expected to manage housework and childcare almost wholly alone. A New York Times article published in May recounted how one Japanese couple meticulously documented their household tasks in an excel spreadsheet—the wife’s list reached 210 versus the husband’s mere 21. Naturally, it went viral after being posted on Twitter.
It may seem trivial but expectations, spoken or unspoken, shape societal norms. The feature Don’t Put a Ring on It on page 192 highlights the pervading notion that women are incomplete if they are unmarried or don’t have children, and the emotional burden of being cast as a “leftover woman” in Asia. Therein lies the rub: while the feminist movement has made great strides in recent decades—from the second wave in the 1960s to Girl Power in the ’90s, and #Metoo a few years back—gender inequality still prevails.
Many successful women have recounted their experiences in this month’s Women’s Issue, including our cover personality Ankiti Bose, co-founder and CEO of Zilingo, a near-unicorn start-up that uses technology to streamline the fashion supply chain. The 28-year-old shares that when entering a meeting, most people assume she is the assistant as opposed to the head honcho. “Gender inequality is a systemic issue, so I think it is more important that we focus on making more women successful. When more people see women leading, this view will no longer be commonly perpetuated,” says Bose in the story on page 170.
This sentiment resonates with other successful women such as Elizabeth von der Goltz, global buying director of Net-a-porter, who stresses that it is imperative to see female role models in order to pave the path forward (page 96). As with other issues, representation plays a crucial role in breaking the system.
The good news is that there is no shortage of women worth emulating—from New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who has shown superb leadership navigating through the pandemic, to South Korean novelist Cho Nam-joo, who tackles inequality in her controversial book Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (page 212), as well as Tan Su Shan, group head of institutional banking at DBS, who is “sending the elevator back down” to groom the next generation of business leaders (page 30).
Of course, there are still glass ceilings to break, and leaning in can only get us so far. If it takes a village to raise a child, then it will take every single one of us to ensure that equality becomes a reality. As Michelle Obama, a strong proponent of female empowerment, once said at a G20 summit: “I am an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them.”