Designing Opportunity for Women with Gina Romero
What is Connected Women and what led you to start it?
Connected Women started out as a community that advocates for technology adoption by women and has now grown to 75,000+ women worldwide. Our mission is to empower women in the digital economy and help them use technology better in their work and life.
I wanted to create a platform for women to become more confident in using technology, because I was a non-techie until I met my husband who’s in tech. I fell in love with technology and how it gave me the flexibility to work from anywhere. I’ve met thousands of women over the years who want more flexibility to manage their career and family and were interested in how technology based work could help them. At Connected Women, we help women transition from traditional jobs to entrepreneurship, freelancing and remote work.
My advocacy started because my mom had to leave her hometown in the Philippines and move to the UK for an opportunity to work. Many women like her, leave their families behind because they feel like they don’t have a choice. With the advancement of technology and connectivity around the globe, I wondered how I might go back to the Philippines to create a platform for Filipino women to access work and other income generating opportunities from homes. Connected Women’s mission is the intersection of technology and community for women’s empowerment. We see technology as a gamechanger for women to leverage opportunities in tech to start their businesses or find location-independent work. We believe that work should be an opportunity, not a sacrifice for women. They shouldn’t have to choose between a career or family.
As our community is very diverse, ranging from ex-corporate executives to women in the grass roots from small rural towns, I’ve been trying to solve one problem: How do we create accessible work opportunities for women no matter what their background is and no matter where they live?
As a result, Connected Women has had many transitions: As a community to help women leverage technology to take their small businesses and side hustles to the next level, a platform that supports Filipino women to find online job opportunities by matching them with entrepreneurs, and now an upskilling program that trains low-income women for jobs in the artificial intelligence industry. Right now our focus is understanding what technology based jobs are available that anyone can do, even with the most basic connectivity, devices and skills. Since identifying AI as an area that has a lot of potential, we’ve trained 250 women in data annotation skills through our partnership with UN Women since last year.
What have you learned about women and girls over the years?
Disempowerment comes in many forms, across many segments
A lot of people think that women’s empowerment is about the poorest of the poor or the lowest income brackets. In reality, I’ve met women from all different segments struggling with their own version of disempowerment. I’ve met many seemingly privileged women from high income families who seem to have everything – but beneath the surface, many of these women were unhappy and disempowered because they didn’t have much control over their own lives, finances, or circumstances. Disempowerment is often about a lack of freedom which is why I believe it’s important to have the ability to earn and survive without being dependent.
Connecting women across commonalities is powerful
Our vision is a world where no woman or her family is left behind, but in reality that’s an impossible vision. How can we possibly help everyone? Everyone has different challenges and our community is very diverse. At the same time, we have seen common threads that run across all segments – for example, parenting struggles are real for most women, even if they come from different parts of the world and from different financial circumstances. I’ve also seen many of our community members struggle with guilt. Women from all different walks of life seem to carry a lot of guilt and often struggle with self-confidence and self-doubt because of this. These are trends that seem to run across the female experience. Bringing women together from different cultures and backgrounds can be an amazing experience - especially when women realize that someone across the world is struggling with something similar. It’s a cool moment when someone realises that they aren’t alone in their experience. They suddenly feel less isolated, because it’s not a problem that only they have anymore.
Antiquated design does women a disservice
When we were designing the job matching platform, I was researching other products and realized that there is so much potential to make it easier for women to get jobs. Some things seemed like obvious features like asking “how many hours do you prefer to work” or “what shifts would best suit you” to allow women the flexibility they need. Instead, most job sites only offered “full-time” or “part-time” as options. I think we lose a lot of female talent from the workplace purely because of the antiquated hiring practices and a lack of innovation.
Women’s lives and day-to-day are not linear
Even in the way we’ve designed Connected Women, we acknowledge the importance of providing flexibility and asynchronous work options for women. Timing matters so much to inclusivity and many of the challenges are not hard to fix. One example I’ve heard, from women in the corporate world, is that most networking events are male-dominated because they tend to be in the evening when women have other responsibilities to take care of at home. So women miss out on networking and that negatively impacts their careers. We try to vary the timings of our events so that women have a wider variety to choose from. When we design longer events, we make sure that they aren’t full days but condensed into 6 hours or less so there’s enough time at the beginning and end of the day to deal with all the things she needs to do. Women still handle a disproportionate amount of household work and that needs to change before the time comes that we don’t need to make these considerations. When we work with women who live in remote areas, where connectivity might be an issue, we partner with the local governments and other community partners to make sure that women can attend. We always try to make our content available in different formats and build our products and services with inclusivity in mind.
Momentary context matters
Covid19 has rapidly accelerated us to the digital economy and the digital access gender gap is much more challenging now. Already the pandemic has slowed the progress of gender equality, and this is a big problem. We are constantly advocating for technology upskilling for women so that they are not left behind in the future of work.
What advice would you have for someone creating a product, service, or community for women?
Don’t pinkwash and make it about women just for the sake of it
I have a love-hate relationship with International Women’s Day. It is a really important date that celebrates the progress and milestones of women’s rights. On the other hand, it’s just a date. For example, I get bombarded with speaking requests every February because a lot of companies have suddenly realised that they need to do something, very often leaving their junior staff to figure out what to do. I think it’s a shame that the focus on gender equality discussions are very often pushed into one day of the year and not given the importance they deserve.
Bias is a part of the problem and the solution
Every now and then, I’ll have someone reach out to me and say that they admire the work that we do to help women but they can’t partner with us because of our focus on gender-based hiring. This just goes to show that there is still a big gap in knowledge and education when it comes to gender equality. I hope that through our advocacy at Connected Women and through the countless dedicated partners that we’ve had the pleasure of working with, that we can raise awareness about the reality of gender gaps. Building a more equitable world is everyone's responsibility. We hope to see more people and organisations becoming part of the solution.
About Gina Romero
Gina Romero is the co-founder and CEO of Connected Women, a social impact tech startup that matches talented Filipino women with meaningful remote work opportunities. She’s an unconventional entrepreneur, community builder, and technology advocate. Gina is an unconventional entrepreneur and community builder. She was a founding member of The Athena Network (UK) women’s business network in 2005 and went on to be the Operations Director in 2008. In October 2020, Gina was awarded as a Finalist of the prestigious “Asia CEO Awards’ in the Shero of the Year category.