Neythri Founding Circle Member and Marketing Co-Chair, Priya Ghandikota, reflects on Neythri’s 2nd Anniversary on International Women’s Day. She reflects on the impact of Neythri beyond the numbers. Read why Priya believes a different type of community-building is taking place universally post-pandemic, how this shift is impacting women’s personal and professional aspirations, and why this new form of women-led communities for women is here to stay.
When I was in my twenties, as a working professional in Canada, a colleague had advised me to learn golf. He explained that all deal brokering happens on the golf course. As a daughter of South Asian immigrants, I knew of no one in my immediate circle who knew golf and when I looked into lessons, the cost was astronomical. Apparently, there weren’t enough women in business who were ambitious enough to add golf to their repertoire of business skills. Sufficed to say, I didn’t take up golf.
When I moved to Singapore from the Bay Area to join the regional executive team for a global technology brand, I discovered three months into the job that my five male peers would participate in extreme sports teams together where again, deals were brokered and relationships nurtured. No women were invited. It was there, well into my thirties, that I finally got the lesson. Strong professional relationships in the office were developed out of shared personal interests outside of the office and women, who could equally participate in these shared interests, were just not on the invite list.
While club memberships are not a thing of the past, there is a different type of community building and networking circuit that is being built in the wake of the pandemic – the rise in women-led communities for women with a mission to democratize access to financial and professional opportunities.
In the last two years, I’ve been amazed at the proliferation of organizations and conferences offering women-only opportunities for enrichment and learning, social connections, financial literacy extended to crypto, co-working spaces, mentorship and professional development and business introductions in the form of SPACs and other investment channels.
With now over 2300 members since launching two years ago, Neythri is the largest organization dedicated to fostering dialogue, and leadership development for South Asian women through connections, mentoring, learning and support. Remarkably, member growth at Neythri has almost always been organic through word-of-mouth, confirming that South Asian women have long been ready for this kind of community.
Neythri’s founders, Mythili Sankaran, Chitra Nayak and Sruthi Ramaswami, recognized this need to support the upward mobility of South Asian women – a community not typically marketed to – and build a more robust pipeline of women in leadership roles.
While Neythri swiftly pivoted to a virtual-first platform in 2020, it used that platform to better understand what members were seeking. Some of the best reviewed programming at Neythri are curated peer-to-peer salons for women to be a professional sounding board for each other, a comprehensive Board Readiness Program to diversify the pipeline of talent for public, private and non-profit board positions, and a mentorship program that has curated connections between professionals at all stages of their career. In 2021, it was clear that members experienced value in this programming and that inspired the launch of Neythri’s tiered membership offering – Discovery, Premier and Leadership Circles.
As Neythri celebrates its 2nd year anniversary on this International Women’s Day, my mind immediately goes to the numbers. The sheer volume of events, workshops and member growth that have occurred in the last two years is inspiring. Over two hundred women have gone through the Neythri Board Readiness Program and over a hundred mentorships/mentee relationships have been cultivated.
But there are seminal moments, too, that are worth reflecting on, such as Neythri co-hosting Indra Nooyi with Women at Google. At this event, Ms. Nooyi made the case for intentional community-building. “In my day, women’s clubs just didn’t exist. My friends and I would sometimes feel guilty for taking time away from our families to meet with each other – but we really should not have felt that way. It’s imperative to have a sisterhood to support you as you chase your ambitions.”
Beyond the numbers, I’ve been inspired by the countless stories of how Neythri has accelerated positive professional shifts for many South Asian women executives, mid-level career professionals and young professionals.
Vidya, a healthtech professional, was negotiating her salary for an incoming role and didn’t have a reference point on start-up salaries, having come from a larger tech company. At a Mix and Mingle Neythri event, she met someone with a healthtech background who later provided support on how to translate a corporate salary to start-up equity. In the end, Neythri “provided a safety net that couldn’t be replicated in any other community” and in her words, she “landed a compensation that left me feeling valued and gave me confidence”.
For Nithya, an executive at Comcast, Neythri connected many aspirational dots.
“If you want to improve diversity and culture in the workplace, you have to go as far left as you can so you can influence outcomes from the beginning. That “beginning” for Nithya was the opportunity to invest in the Neythri Futures Fund (NFF) which later gave her the confidence to invest in similar funds. Nithya had taken a financial planning workshop at Neythri where she learned to set funds aside for aspirational purposes. This guidance primed her well for the opportunity to invest in NFF.
Nithya was also interested in exploring Board roles. She describes the Board Readiness Program as helping her be a better leader at Comcast, likening the Program to getting an Executive MBA. “I have a better sense of my value proposition and how to communicate that”. The virtuous cycle that Neythri programming collectively leads to feeds into how you think differently. “When you have women who look like you that were so successful, then it begs the question `why not me’? You have to see it to be it.”
Meerah, was also underway in her Board search and attended Neythri’s Board Readiness Program. She had joined Neythri originally to pay it forward and help other South Asian women. The Board Readiness Program, and conversations with members of the Founding Circle, helped her surface more clarity to opportunities she was looking at and specifically helped her prepare for her Board interviews. She landed her first Board position.
Radha also used Neythri’s Board Readiness Program to cultivate her narrative and ultimately her executive bio. In her own words, “Neythri’s Board Readiness Program helped me really understand how it’s important to showcase my work and achievements and that of my team to our stakeholders with respect to the business value we were delivering. In short, the Board Readiness Program helped me with storytelling”. This past month, Radha’s transition from an executive at Verizon, where she had been for over a decade, to Capital One as Vice-President of Engineering, was in large part inspired by the transitions she saw with other Neythri members and the trusted sounding board she has gained within her Neythri Salon.
Minya’s job search was not planned. In the Fall of 2021, she was faced with a problem not unique to South Asians living in the US. Her employer at the time had changed their mind about sponsorship and Minya was all of a sudden facing time constraints on employment related to the expiration of her H1-B visa. She surfaced this issue with a number of people at Neythri and was surprised by the outpouring of support from every member she reached out to. Support was extended through company introductions, guidance on how to position her immigration status and, when she finally got an offer from a Fortune 500, a very concrete strategy on negotiation that paid off with a significant increase in her base salary offer. While Minya had originally reached out with a broad appeal, she found the responses from Neythri’s community specific, action-oriented, genuine and invaluable.
While not looking for a corporate position, Nikita, also was facing a fork in the road decision about her successful platform business related to internship management. The pandemic had forced her business to pivot. While almost considering quitting and moving to a corporate role, Nikita instead leaned on the counsel from other Neythri Founders and designed a new strategy that stays true to the core of her business and her company is now preparing for a series A raise.
The unquantifiable impact that Neythri has had on many in the last two years becomes obvious when Suja discusses the confidence she gained in pursuing a promotion or when Pragati shares the shift that she saw in herself in creating value for the Neythri Futures Fund beyond writing a cheque or when Paawan recounts finding her dream job on the Neythri Job Board.
It’s clear that this model works. We are no longer just playing golf. We are up-levelling our skills and domain knowledge and defining the space within frontier topics and emerging industries. We are listening and counseling each other. We are brokering deals in environments that suit us best. We are investing. We are defining our narrative in ways that position us broadly as a community that matters and we are showing up as Indra Nooyi described – as a `sisterhood that helps you chase your ambitions’.
Author Bio Priya Ghandikota is a Founding Circle Member and Marketing Co-Chair at Neythri. Priya is a brand and marketing leader with 18+ years of experience at leading Fortune 500s and start-ups for both D2C and B2B technology brands, including Oracle, LinkedIn, Pebble (Acquired by Fitbit), and BlackBerry. She has led marketing throughout various stages of growth – start-up, scale up and exit. While based in Toronto, Singapore, London, Indonesia and Mumbai, Priya drove unprecedented subscriber growth and new commercial partnerships, being tapped to build regional marketing and retail operations from the ground up for global technology brands. For the past eight years, she has been a member of the President’s Leadership Advisory Circle and Lotus Circle at The Asia Foundation. Twitter: @pghandik
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