Portraying Gina Romero as tech-smart, business-savvy, down-to-earth, and a connector of people and ideas is too simplistic. There’s more to her than meets the eye.
“I often introduce myself as someone who has failed in business several times since the age of 16, not because I am proud of my mistakes but because I value failure as a catalyst for success. I have since dedicated my life to helping others succeed,” Romero writes on her blog site.
The only child of a former domestic helper grew up in the UK surrounded by overseas foreign workers just like her mom.
“My mum was one of the courageous pioneering OFWs (Overseas Foreign Workers) who went to the UK in the early 1970s to be a domestic worker. Growing up in the UK, I was surrounded by Filipinos who had left their kids home in the Philippines when they had to leave for overseas work,” says Romero, who speaks with a thick British accent.
It is not surprising that she is a staunch advocate of women empowerment in a field that she’s familiar with, technology, specifically in artificial intelligence (AI).
“Making sure that women have access to technology is a gamechanger. It allows us to bypass traditional career options. It creates opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist,” she says.
“Community, entrepreneurship and technology are at the heart of everything I do. I run many businesses and initiatives focusing on providing a platform for women to harness technology for success,” says Romero, who admits she was once a troublesome teenager and a college dropout.
Foray into technology
Romero’s foray into technology was accidental.
“I ended up in technology by accident. I did not incline anything technical until I met my husband, who has been passionate about technology since he was a young boy.
“Although I was a late adopter, I quickly realised that learning technology skills would create opportunities for me. As a high school graduate with supposedly limited prospects for success, technology has allowed me to self-educate, start businesses with little to no capital, amplify my advocacy and build my influence.”
Her mum met her British dad in the UK. They were married, travelled to the Philippines for Romero’s birth, and back to the UK when she was six months old.
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She was 14 when her family decided to relocate to her mother’s provincial town in the Philippines, where her parents set up a family-run pig farm (her first job was raising pigs). When the cataclysmic 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcano eruption happened, the family’s business was one of the tragic casualties.
At 19, she returned to the UK, working in a currency exchange firm before joining British Airways as a long-haul cabin crew. She became a co-founding member of The Athena Network, a top referral network for women that started in 2005 in the UK and brought The Athena Network to Singapore in 2011.
Empowering Filipino women
In 2013 Romero co-founded Connected Women (CW), a Philippine-based startup social enterprise that believes technology can help women who had given up their careers to spend more time with their families by providing them with remote work opportunities.
CW runs a number of initiatives that provide technical skills training and online job matching. It has since received global recognition in the categories of inclusive innovation (Asia/USA), the future of work (UK), and e-employment (Switzerland).
The idea of empowering Filipino women came after she hired the family’s domestic helper when she moved to Singapore in 2010 with her husband and three sons. She was already working with women at The Athena Network, but the domestic helpers’ recurring narratives didn’t occur to her until she employed one in Singapore.
It suddenly hit her: for decades, work has been a sacrifice for Filipino women, with many needing to leave home to work overseas or choosing not to pursue a career to focus on raising their families.
“Connected Women was an aspiration—a vision. My idea was to solve the problems I spent my whole life questioning. Why do women need to choose between career or family? Why do so many Filipinos leave home to find decent work? Why do we need to be constrained within the hours of a working day or working week? What does it matter where we are when we work if we can do our work anywhere at any time? How do we create job opportunities for those who are deemed to be unemployable?
“These questions led to the idea of creating solutions. I was and continue to be inspired by many people doing fantastic work to solve these problems.
“There are so many that inspired my vision for Connected Women, but, in reality, a lot of hard work happens behind the scenes, and we’ve faced so many challenges. My Co-Founder Ruth Yu-Owen was the real catalyst behind Connected Women because she encouraged me to think bigger. She is the epitome of the “never-say-die” attitude, and I greatly respect and admire her.
“We started as a job matching platform for Filipina freelancers but were overwhelmed with the supply side. We had too many job seekers and not enough employers. Many who needed work were simply not skilled or experienced enough for such a competitive space.
“I was obsessed with solving that problem. How do you create tech-powered jobs for people with the most basic skills, connectivity and devices? How do we bring jobs to the masses and ensure they aren’t left behind in future work?
“I stumbled on the idea of impact sourcing and started putting together a business plan to pivot our original business to focus on this space. Then the pandemic hit, and the timing couldn’t have been better. We changed our business model to focus on upskilling and providing socially responsible outsourcing for the AI industry.”
Filipinos are hardworking, entrepreneurial, and resilient and are known for excellent creativity and customer service. These skills are in demand in the digital economy. The idea to create upskilling programs and opportunity matching for underprivileged women came from there. With increasing access to technology and connectivity, CW wants to make sure that no woman is left behind.
The challenge is that the barrier to entry can be high, and this space is competitive. The skills and experience needed to succeed are much harder for women from less advantaged segments to learn.
Romero continues, “We looked at the different industries that are fast-growing and in relatively early stages and found the AI industry was a good fit.
“Although a lot of the work in AI and Machine learning is highly technical, a huge amount of manual work is needed behind the scenes. This work is often carried out by invisible humans (humans in the loop) that handle large volumes of data that need tagging, categorising and cleaning.
“The work is simple but requires critical thinking skills, attention to detail and focus. And there are a lot of career growth opportunities for those who want to expand their knowledge and skills in this field.”
Nevertheless, someone is bound to cast doubt over CW’s underprivileged women AI tech capabilities. Romero is unperturbed because most clients they speak to are very receptive to what CW represents. Impact sourcing or socially responsible outsourcing is becoming something businesses are looking for. CW clients are aligned with its mission to empower women and can see the value that CW brings.
Most importantly, CW ladies are steady, stable and dedicated workers who need to earn to support their families. So this is more than just a job for them. It’s a chance, or sometimes a second chance they never thought they would have.
Upskilled underprivileged women
Jane* left her job as a pharmacy assistant at a local drugstore chain for two reasons: she had a newborn baby and COVID-19.
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She joined CW’s data annotators pool in 2021 and has been a high-performing team member for CW’s image annotation projects, including a US Silicon Valley client, a local data science company and a local telco.
Jane earns an additional PHP 5,000 a month as a part-time data annotator working from home, which helps augment their family income to cover their daily needs. Moreover, her flexi-time makes it easier to take care of her family. She has two kids, and her husband works as a software engineer.
Rita* worked full-time in customer service-related jobs for almost 18 years. In May 2018, she stopped working to care for her son, who was diagnosed with Class III Primary Complex. The pandemic made it difficult for her to find a job because she needed to look after her son. She heard about CW’s Elevate AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Data Annotation) program. She saw an opportunity to get a part-time job, continue to learn and meet new people while staying home with her son. Needless to say, she applied.
“With free training provided by Elevate AIDA helped me develop my skills more and gives me hope that I can be part of the project. I feel blessed that I was able to be part of AI Projects. It is comforting for us mothers to get jobs in the comfort of our homes. It gives us earnings to provide for our family needs.” She started part-time work as an annotator at the end of 2020 and, in June 2021, became a full-time team member at CW, earning PHP 25,000 a month.
“I was able to pay some debts since my husband’s salary is not enough to pay for everything we need. It’s a great help for both of us to have jobs to have a comfortable living,” shares Rita, who now shares CW’s mission to empower women.
On the gender bias that men are better than women in technology
GR: While I’m not an expert, I subscribe to the idea that every individual has both brain preference and competence. My opinion is that preference is the mother of motivation. We are motivated by what we prefer, so finding work that you enjoy means you will eventually be better at it.
With my team, I always want to know what type of work they prefer, as opposed to what they are good at. It’s easier to build competence in the things we enjoy than to learn to love something we happen to be good at.
While we continue to see gender imbalance in specific fields, I believe this is more related to perception after being exposed to decades-old biases. To this day, I still hear parents or grandparents declaring that certain toys or activities are “for boys” or “for girls”. This continues to contribute to gender inequality. If we want to create a more equitable future, we need to be more conscious of the biases that we put out there.
On breaking the glass ceiling
GR: I can’t honestly say that I relate to the concept of a glass ceiling – not to my work, at least. As someone who hasn’t spent time in the corporate world, the term was alien to me until I moved to Singapore and met many women in successful, high-pressure corporate careers.
I’m always amazed by what these women have achieved in their fields, pushing back against workplace biases and reaching the top of their game despite these challenges.
I don’t see myself like that. In fact, I recently surprised someone by referring to myself as an underachiever. I measure my success on the impact I create, and everything else is tied to that.
But I think of myself as an innovator, a problem solver and an entrepreneur. Innovation – in particular, the idea of inclusive innovation fascinates me. I believe inclusive innovation is the answer to solving the world’s wicked problems.
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I put great value on the influence I’ve gained from over 15 years of advocating for women’s empowerment through technology in the UK, Singapore and now back home in the Philippines. I value it because I’ve earned it.
On her inspirations
GR: Aidha in Singapore was a huge inspiration to me, particularly Veronica Gamez, the CEO at the time. Their work on breaking the cycle of poverty for domestic workers challenged me to do more for Filipino women.
Chef Benny Se Teo, who employs formerly incarcerated people in his restaurants to give them a second chance, made me realise the importance of creativity in business and that all businesses can and should make a profit and do good.
Undeniably, there’s more to Romero than meets the eye. Indeed, “inclusion” is deeply embedded in her DNA. It manifests in everything she does. Just look at CW’s numbers so far: 75,000+ community members, 17,000+ attendees of its global meetups, and nearly 9,000+ job applicants ready for matching. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This story first appeared on weeklysparks.com on March 18, 2022
*not their real names
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