EmpowerIn: LinkedIn leader shares how she helps women realise their full potential

Feon Ang, LinkedIn’s Vice-President of Talent and Learning Solutions for Asia-Pacific, is a firm advocate of empowering women at the workplace.

“Many women struggle with the feeling that they are not confident enough or they don’t have a voice,” says Feon. Widespread gender bias about the way men and women communicate in the workplace exacerbates this issue, with assertive women seen as bossy or even hysterical, she adds.

Women often underplay themselves too, Feon says, such as listing fewer skills on their LinkedIn profiles and connecting less than men. She has observed that this discrepancy is larger in Singapore than in other parts of the region like Hong Kong and India.

As such, Feon has made it her personal mission to help women around her realise their full potential. In her current role at LinkedIn, she seeks to be an advocate for other women to grow their careers with the company.

One example of how she is doing so: Feon spearheads EmpowerIn, a LinkedIn programme using virtual learning sessions and group mentoring to help female employees in the Asia Pacific region become better leaders by improving their presentation abilities and equipping them with skills to lead with data and data-driven insights.

And programmes like Feon’s that invest consciously in developing female leaders are yielding impressive results – over the last four years, LinkedIn has seen a 66 per cent increase in the number of women in leadership positions in global sales organisations. In technical roles, the number of women leaders has increased by three times.

Beyond organisation-wide programmes that happen at scale, Feon thinks it is equally important for women to make conscious efforts to grow and support the women around them in the workplace.

“Having a role model makes such a big difference,” Feon explains. “When women see another woman in a leadership role, it really helps to inspire them and believe that their company is real and honest about grooming women into leadership positions.”

Training talents day in and day out in her job has led Feon to conclude that women have certain unique skill sets that benefit tech companies.

She says, “Women have innate soft skills such as creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving that are a boon to the tech sector. There’s power in combining soft skills with technical skills such as the ABC – artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing.”

“This brilliant combination makes women very special.”