Yaso Ponnuthurai said she has always felt the need to help other women in the community and she has recently been awarded for her efforts.
Curtin MB graduate initiated the Women in Canning program and she was a public speaker in the Women Economic Forum (WEF) in Perth from July 5-7, 2019.
WEF is one of the largest women’s international conferences that enables women and world leaders to expand businesses opportunities and build global connections from empowering women’s entrepreneur- ship and leadership.
The Founder of WEF Dr Harbeen Arora awarded Ms Ponnuthurai with an Exceptional Women of Excellence award.
With connections to 100,000 members and inspiring women across 150 countries, the Perth event was the inaugural forum in Australia and a regional alliance of Women’s Eco- nomic Forum India.
Of the total 94,000 Canning population recorded in the national 2016 Census, 44,887 are women.
The statistics also show that more than half of the people in Canning were born overseas and 40 per cent of them speak a language other than English.
Ms Ponnuthurai said it was inspiring to meet with so many empowering and successful women from around the world in one room considering most of them have achieved so much globally yet they were so simple.
“My vision of women in Canning is to motivate and encourage them to showcase their talents and act as mentors to other women,” she said.
“There is a need to connect multiple ethnic and multicultural communities within Canning so that they can interact within a comfort- able forum for the enrichment of the community.
“By empowering women we can boost their self-esteem, build opportunities to contribute to society economically and politically and it could potentially help reduce domestic and family violence.
During Ms Ponnuthurai speech at the WEF conference she said there was an unfair binary judgement that women face when they enter politics or become leaders.
“In the male-dominated political sphere there are only two kinds of women in politics the ‘hard bitch’ alias ‘Iron Lady’ (see Thatcher of UK, Indira Gandhi of India) also known as ‘the Merkel Model’ (Ger- many),” she said.
“The second is the over-emotion- al, weak, wavering and incompe- tent leader (see Theresa May of the UK).”
Her advice to women was to ignore the chatter, be yourself and stand firm on personal values.
“Be the ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ and add to that hard work, passion and a clear view of where you want to go.”
