Mansi Khanna, Google India’s head of ads marketing, is a passionate advocate for women’s equality.
We were two young girls growing up in a time when women’s equality was not commonly practiced. But my parents always believed in giving us opportunities irrespective of our gender, and that value has stayed with me through life. Since becoming a mother to a girl, I’ve found myself, as a marketer, being even more intentional about applying it to the stories I tell and the choices I make.
Yet as I work toward creating a more inclusive world for women, I can’t help but notice the ways women are still overlooked by businesses — from a lack of diverse voices in marketing to campaigns that miss the mark for half the population.
When businesses ignore the invisible barriers that women face, they risk leaving a significant chunk of their audience on the table.
There’s more to be done to advance women’s equality. Although the gender parity score in East Asia and the Pacific reached 69% in 2022, women still come up against many pervasive and invisible barriers. These include their authentic portrayal, or lack thereof, in mass media, and opportunities for professional development. When businesses ignore or even perpetuate these unconscious biases, they risk leaving a significant chunk of their audience on the table.
Women will add $4.5 trillion, or 12%, to the region’s collective annual GDP, if they are meaningfully involved by businesses. So whether it’s including women in marketing insights through bias-free data practices, representing them authentically in ad campaigns, or supporting them as marketers through professional upskilling, there’s action we can all take.
Here are three things I’ve learned through my experiences and over the course of my career, that can help businesses and the marketing industry prevent women from being excluded — as customers and marketing professionals.
Include women in your marketing insights, strategies, measurement
Women in APAC aren’t just a significant portion of your customer base. They’re a force to be reckoned with. Not only are they important financial decision-makers, they’re also expected to surpass other regions as the biggest global spenders by 2030.
To connect more deeply with women customers, you’ll need to ensure your marketing strategies are guided by accurate, relevant, and bias-free data. This is because a brand relying on consumer insights that don’t accurately reflect the gender diversity of their customers may overlook the significance of women customers.
To include women in your marketing insights and plans, adopt a data-driven, privacy-safe measurement strategy. Google Ads’ consolidated view of audience demographics lets you gain a deeper understanding of an audience segment in real time and adapt your marketing strategy to address their specific needs.
Take for example Google India’s marketing strategy to include women in the use of mobile internet. The data shows that women in India are 41% less likely than men to use mobile internet, and Google India went a step further to uncover the insight behind women’s lower usage.
What it found was that literacy is a top barrier for women in India to use mobile internet. Informed by this insight, Google India launched the #BolneSeSabHoga campaign to show women how they can use Google Voice Search to easily access the internet, regardless of their literacy levels. The campaign made waves, sparking over 150,000 conversations on social media.
Represent and give voice to women in advertising
Every marketer knows people are drawn to ads that reflect their experiences. Yet a whopping 79% of women in APAC say they do not feel represented in the ads they see, according to Mediacom, and it’s not hard to see why: Only 24% of women influencers have been represented in the media in the last 20 years.1
Clearly, there’s an untapped opportunity to amplify women’s voices in advertising, especially since women in APAC are more likely to purchase influencer-endorsed products and tend to be more persuaded by influencers of the same gender.
The same Mediacom study found that the gap between women consumers and women influencers is even more prevalent in traditionally male-dominated industries like finance and automotive. Although 40% of women today actively participate and make decisions in these categories, fewer than 10% of women influencers are making social content for them. This gap can be even wider for women of color, demonstrating the need for diverse representation.
But change is afoot. Finance brands like FWD Life Philippines, for instance, have recently partnered with women creators like Andrea Angeles and Mommy Haidee for its online game show “Pinoy Money Master,” designed to demystify complex financial concepts while entertaining audiences.
Platforms like YouTube also help brands connect with a wide range of women creators, including across ethnicities, ages, and body sizes, to represent women from all walks of life. With YouTube BrandConnect, for example, your brand can easily collaborate with the creators most relevant to your audience.
Take Vietnam’s Game Studio 9 for instance. To drive awareness of its game, “Play Together,” the game developer partnered with Misthy and VeVe, two popular women streamers, to demonstrate how well the game plays in real-time. Boosted by the creators’ strong community of followers, “Play Together” became the most downloaded app in Vietnam in August 2023.
Empower women through digital marketing upskilling
To truly include women, brands need to empower us not just as customers, but also as professionals. Like myself, many women in APAC juggle multiple roles across work, family, and social, and our professional development is often put on the back burner. This contributes to a digital competence gap among marketers, which in Singapore, means only 5% of women say they’re very familiar with digital marketing.
As the marketing industry embraces digital transformation, there needs to be a concerted effort to help women bridge the digital competence gap. One such obstacle to closing the gap is “time poverty.”
Despite strong demand among women to upskill digitally, they’re often unable to because of the burden of unpaid care and domestic work. Women in APAC spend more time on care responsibilities compared with the rest of the world, investing 4X more time than men. Consequently, 45% of working women in APAC feel that managing familial responsibilities often comes in their way of career development.
Given women’s time constraints, providing accessible and flexible upskilling opportunities is crucial. Google’s DigiPivot, for example, is a free, virtual learning platform designed to help women in India — including those with disabilities and those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community — develop the skills needed for a career in digital marketing. Since 2023, it has supported the digital upskilling of 400 women, and over two-thirds of its participants have made a successful pivot to digital marketing.
Google Australia, on the other hand, has offered 10,000 scholarships to help women and First Nations Australians enroll in Google Career Certificates, an online training program that lets participants acquire skills in areas like digital marketing, UX design, and data analytics at their own time.
The future of APAC may be unwritten, but one thing’s certain: To scale greater heights, everyone needs to be empowered. By ensuring women are included in your marketing insights, ad strategies, and digital upskilling efforts, your business can close the parity gap between genders and create a future where everyone thrives.
