1 Feb 25

Along my journey as a career woman, I have been very blessed to meet so many amazing ladies. Their stories have inspired, encouraged, enlightened, and empowered me as I too seek to be a champion for gender equality and women's representation. The future is female and it is my honour to be able to call these ladies my sisters.

One such amazing lady I have had the pleasure of speaking with recently was Dr Yasmin binti Mohd Hasni, Principal Assistant Director of the Safety of Navigation and Maritime Communication Division (NAVCOM) in the Malaysia Marine Department (MMD). Her story is both inspiring and interesting as she was only the third female officer to join the MMD back in 1998 and she rose through the ranks to where she is today. But above and beyond her career successes, she has been a champion through and through for gender equality and women's representation.

Something Dr Yasmin said really struck a chord with me - that women trying to one up men was never the intention from the start; reflecting on Adam and Hawa, they're supposed to complement each other. Wow! If only we as a society went back to the basics and fundamentals of it all. We should be working together, not against each other. It's sad to see the state of gender inequality not just in Malaysia, but throughout the world.

It really makes one wonder how things reached this point. For example, Dr Yasmin shared with me that when she graduated from the Malaysia National University in the 1980s, the number of females outnumbered the males in the Medicine, Biomedical, Life Sciences, Engineering, and Computer Science faculties. Yet gender inequality is at the worst its ever been in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) today.

Things need to change and they needed to change yesterday. We, both men and women, need to band together to fight the inequalities and injustices so prevalent in our society now.

Though it seems like a herculean task to overcome a problem so systemic and pervasive, we can each do our own little part to help. Like in the case of another amazing lady I've met along my journey - Mdm Lim Poh Choo, one of my lecturers back in university. She always did her best to instil in us students a sense of equality amongst the genders, be it during our group discussions or in our work. But I think the strongest lessons she taught us about gender equality were through her very life - as the sole breadwinner in her family, it was her husband that stayed home to focus on the home and their children. The equality was not in that they needed to do the same things, but that they each had the opportunities to make the choices they wanted to do what was best for them - they complemented each other. And that's really all you could ask for.

- Nurul