Valuing Asia’s Women Leaders
During the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in 2017, Prime Minister of Poland Beata Szydło met with Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counselor of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Scholars, analysts and activists in Asia have categorised and named the experiences of the region’s women leaders as “Asian” to our detriment. We ultimately devalue the significant roles these women played and it is a loss for global comparative knowledge. Rather than constructing small categories, where nothing neatly fits and everything spills over, perhaps it is about taking down the walls and erasing some of the geographic borders that we naturally turn to. With those walls down, an Asian view may serve a fundamental purpose of offering insights that benefit the global community.
Writing for The Interpreter, Ramona Vijeyarasa argues that women in Asia are overlooked in popular feminist discourses about global leaders. While these women and their countries offer a rich source of information about the experiences of women in high positions, they are boxed behind the label “Asian” and assumed to be incomparably different from women in the West. This attitude is not only unfair, but is self-defeating and leads the conversation as a whole to suffer for what it misses in Asian women’s voices.
