About She
SG Her Empowerment (“SHE”) is an independent non-profit organisation, with Institution of Public Character status, that strives to empower girls and women through community engagements and partnerships.
We engage with the community
SHE engages with and listens to women and men across the community, and from all age groups and walks of life.
We are data-driven
SHE facilitates research and gathers data to clearly frame the issues and identify needs, in order to take an evidence-backed approach to shape impactful strategies.
We connect and collaborate
SHE collaborates with community stakeholders from different interest groups, civil society organisations, corporates, and the Government.
We advocate change
Through these efforts, SHE advocates positive change and champions a more equal society.
ENGAGE
Real change begins with honest conversations. We facilitate ongoing candid dialogues to identify issues impacting the advancement of girls and women.
We take an inclusive approach to achieving our goals, and engage women and men across the community and from all age groups and walks of life.
Got a minute? We want to hear from you! Participate in our latest online poll.
RESEARCH AND DATA
SHE is data-driven and evidence-based.
We facilitate research and gather data to clearly frame the issues and identify needs, in order to shape impactful strategies.
Effective change requires sensitivity to cultural nuances and community values. The improvements we advocate keep this in mind, thereby creating impact designed for our society.
CONNECT AND COLLABORATE
SHE works in partnership.
Meaningful partnerships are key to transformative change.
SHE collaborates with community stakeholders from different interest groups, civil society organisations, corporates and the Government.
Leadership
Our story
SHE’s mission is to work with the community, partner organisations, and government agencies to identify opportunities to empower girls, energise youth, and advocate positive change for the entire community.
Inspired by the work of the Sunlight Alliance for Action to tackle online harms, especially those targeted at women and girls (“Sunlight AfA”), SHE was founded by lawyer Stefanie Yuen Thio when she saw the need for a community effort to tackle emerging new issues for women, including online harms. Her decision was rooted in the Sunlight AfA findings that online harms are an urgent issue, yet many victims do not know how to seek help and therefore do not report incidents of harm.
Stefanie, together with other members of the AfA who eventually became SHE’s founding team, decided to take on the task of combatting this growing scourge. The first key initiative was the setting up of SHECARES@SCWO, a support centre for targets of online harms that focuses on girls and women.
It was also clear to the SHE founding team that there are many other issues faced by girls and women, which require attention. For example, women are still severely under-represented in the C-suite and in other leadership positions in Singapore, they continue to bear the brunt of caregiving duties in the family, and they struggle to balance their school, work, and home-life commitments. In looking to address these issues, SHE will also take into account the findings from the 2022 White Paper on Singapore Women’s Development.
Jo is Senior Managing Director at boutique strategy communications firm WATATAWA Consulting, specialising in stakeholder engagement and change management.
She works with leaders to engage diverse stakeholders with diverging interests, compounded by cross cultural differences, to drive effective business transformation, especially in the ESG sphere.
Her passion is in driving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes that are tailored to cultural contexts, because transposing protocols from different cultural contexts is not merely ineffective, it is potentially detrimental from stimulating a countervailing backlash effect. Her primary research of female Asian leaders from an intersectional perspective - with a focus on gender and ethnicity in the postcolonial contexts of Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong - has demonstrated that tactics that work for female leaders in ‘Western’ contexts do not fully translate.
The passion to champion diversity is combined with a determination to help diverse groups of people to work better together amid natural resistances to painful, often unwelcome, policy or behavioural changes amid fundamental differences in cultural expectations. As such, she is training as a coach, and in experiential group dynamics with the Institute of Group Analysis, UK.
Prior to corporate life, she was a journalist at Singapore Press Holdings, both as a reporter and editor, last at the Business Times. Jo holds Master and Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Cambridge, and an Executive Master in Change (Distinction) degree from INSEAD.