Behind every successful woman stands her will

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In an article appeared on TechCrunch recently, the writer described about Epomi, a beauty retail startup founded by Huong Tran in 2014.

“They told me that women are too emotional to run a business and they don’t like investing in them," Huong told TechCrunch.

Tran Bich Huong, Epomi's CEO. (Photo: TechCrunch)

Tran eventually found investment for her startup, but her initial experience is not uncommon. In both developed and emerging economies, gender discrimination is a universal challenge. So is sexual harassment— a problem that’s becoming increasingly visible in light of the seemingly endless string of harassment scandals happening in the tech world.

Compared to other Asian countries, however, Vietnam performs relatively well on some measures of gender equality, according to TechCrunch. For example, women hold 17.6% of board seats in Vietnam, more than any other country in the Asia-Pacific region except Australia (20.1%), according to a recent study by Deloitte. The study, which looked at 64 countries globally, also found that Vietnam outperformed the global average (15%), as well as more developed neighbors like Singapore (9.4%) and China (9.2%).

"Women also run a substantial share of Vietnam’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Roughly 25% of SMEs in Vietnam are owned by women, according to a 2016 report by the Mekong Business Initiative (MBI), a development partnership co-led by the Asian Development Bank and the Australian government. In South Asia, by contrast, only 8% of SMEs are women-owned", TechCrunch's writer put it.

Women lead some of Vietnam’s largest and most iconic companies as well. One of the most prominent is Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, who is best known as founder and CEO of Vietjet, a popular budget airline that listed on the Vietnamese stock exchange earlier this year, and which helped make her Southeast Asia’s only female billionaire.

High-profile female executives can also be found in a diverse array of other industries, from retail to agriculture, as well as on the startup circuit.

But not every industry had the same sensibility. Back in 2015, in a series of stories for Techonomy about Vietnam’s burgeoning IT sector, throughout dozens of interviews and site visits with local IT services firms, the writer said that he came across almost no women. As in most countries, women are underrepresented in Vietnam’s tech industry, though some educational organizations are keeping this in mind as they work to build the country’s STEM talent.

“Vietnam has some prominent female business leaders, but that doesn’t mean there’s gender equality across the economy,” says Shuyin Tang, a Principal in the Vietnam office of Patamar Capital (formerly Unitus Impact), an impact investment fund with offices in San Francisco and across Asia. To help bridge the gap, Patamar Capital recently launched an investment fund specifically for women-owned businesses in Southeast Asia.

According to TechCrunch, other organizations are also working to support Vietnamese businesswomen. For example, MBI recently helped launch the Women’s Initiative for Startups and Entrepreneurship, a multi-stakeholder program that will provide programming and services to support women-owned businesses in Vietnam, which a vision to expand to the Mekong region. Another one is Women of Vietnam, a private community launched by a Vietnamese-Australian entrepreneur in 2015.

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