Asian Women Rising - the start of something

It was amazing and what a privilege, with Xero’s sponsorship, that I was able to bring together a group of inspiring Asian women at Xero Auckland on 17 July 2021!

This was our first ever event. We had breakfast. We made connections. We discussed our challenges as Asian women in western workplaces. We drew comfort and inspirations from each other’s authentic stories. We have a goal of helping the next generation of Asian women rise.

Like any first dates, we started off introducing ourselves. There were 17 of us, all from different backgrounds, professions, ethnic origins and ages. For the first time, I felt it was not awkward but indeed a pleasure for us to answer the question “Where are you from?” and tell each other our immigrant stories.

Most of us are what we call the 1.5 generation as we moved to NZ when we were little with our parents. Our parents are the first generation immigrants and because we tagged along, we make up the 0.5

Being a 1.5er myself, I could relate to a lot of the challenges discussed. We delved deep inside ourselves to surface the internal challenges. These include being heavily influenced by and feeling the need to conform to parental and societal expectations; having difficulty in determining how much to assimilate and yet being comfortable with our Asian identity; and not being able to see or be aware of our potential because no one else is out there doing it.

External challenges are what I term as challenges we encounter as we interact with society. They include unintended subtle racism that come from questions like “Where are you really from?” and comments such as “Oh, you speak perfect English.”; and being perceived as or having to fit the “Asian” and “women” moulds which may lead us to be underestimated or passed on for opportunities.

We also had a healthy debate on when it is beneficial or important to highlight our culture in conversations. Some of us might have shied away from discussing our culture in the past as it is a sensitive subject or we self-reject while some of us did not want to point to our culture every time when we don’t fit a western mould because it is not true that it is always linked to culture.

Now we see that discussing and highlighting cultural differences is more of an opportunity to build understanding and learning for all parties. There is also no right answer for how best enhance cultural understanding as efforts are necessary from all angles and scales, from ground up individual conversations to wider and more public advocacy for change.

We thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company and sharing our stories that two hours flew past. We decided that we want to keep this going and made a commitment to come together again on 21 August to have breakfast and discuss what solutions or experiments we can try to tackle these internal and external challenges. So join us for next time!

Thanks Xero again for your generous sponsorship. This would not have been possible without your support for us and for diversity and inclusion!