Nicole Yuen, founder of the Women’s Workplace Index, and Abir Abdul Rahim, co-founder of Lean In Malaysia, share the challenges they have faced on their professional journeys and highlight the role we all have to play in effecting change for working women
In 2013, Abir Abdul Rahim was back in Malaysia from the UK after receiving a first class honours degree in actuarial science and a master’s in actuarial management. But the reception back home was not what she had anticipated or hoped for.
“I was 23 and ready to take on the world because of my strong achievements. But, sadly, when I came back, I had society asking me when I was going to get married, and saying, “By 28, you should already have two kids”. I was a young woman trying to make it in the corporate world and I wanted to be known in the Islamic insurance industry.”
Looking around for a platform, support group or community to share her struggles with, Rahim found none. That was when she came across Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, which was originally published in 2013. “It was all that I wanted to know. It was women taking a seat at the table; women not apologising for being ambitious,” she says.
Sandberg urged women to start their own community and Rahim did just that in 2015, launching Lean In Malaysia to “educate, enable and empower women to realise their fullest potential as a catalyst to equality,” she says. And it was here that she found her tribe.
“I wasn’t alone. I had thought I was wrong: why don’t I want to think of marriage? But there was a bunch of us who wanted to be allowed to be ourselves and to not be templated, questioning, ‘Do I really need to have kids by 28? What if I want to travel the world?’ So, that’s how it happened.”
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Women need to speak up. That is still lacking in Asian culture. It’s not that women aren’t enough—women are enough. It’s just the social conditioning that we are brought up in that sets us up that way
Hongkonger Nicole Yuen had faced similar societal and familial expectations in her career. After graduating from law school in Hong Kong, Yuen completed a master’s at Harvard Law School and practised as a Wall Street lawyer in New York, before moving to Amsterdam and then to London, where she worked for law firm Clifford Chance. As a rare securities lawyer who spoke both English and Chinese, Yuen’s services were called upon frequently in the early 1990s, when Chinese companies first started looking to list on international exchanges, and she was then seconded back to Hong Kong, where she became the first Chinese person, man or woman, to be made a partner at Clifford Chance. Soon after, she departed, pivoting in her career to become a banker.
Yuen says she faced more than a decade of pressure from her parents to get married, not to mention to have kids, and escape being a “leftover” woman. “I was fortunate that I found somebody, but then the problems started,” says Yuen, whose demanding career was not conducive to raising a family. “It was a painful decision to leave investment banking and search for something else.” Another career pivot followed as Yuen moved from corporate finance into equities.
While Yuen’s journey was not without challenges, she says that as she moved her way up the corporate ladder, eventually spending 20 years as a managing director at both UBS and Credit Suisse, she forgot about the struggles she went through.
That was until her daughter decided to follow in Yuen’s footsteps, choosing to pursue a career in investment banking. “All the difficulties that I had seen 40 years ago were still the same. It was amazing. Situations like sexual harassment and unconscious bias were still very prevalent,” says Yuen. Retired and with some time on her hands, she was motivated to act. “I felt it was my duty to do something for her—for women.”