"Fitting in, feeling at home and climbing a career jungle gym instead of a ladder"
At Across the Pond we are privileged to get to work with some brilliant women across the tech sector who care about empowerment and representation, and we want to shine a light on their work and share their stories, to inspire others. The result is a planned series of interviews called Women in Tech.
I was thrilled when Sapna Chadha, who is Vice President of Marketing and Diversity Lead for Google Southeast Asia and India, agreed to be our first interviewee. We sat down for what turned out to be a fascinating conversation where Sapna revealed what it was like growing up in the US as the daughter of refugees, the benefits of following a labyrinthine career path and why she no longer cares about fitting in.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?
I am currently the Vice President of Marketing for both Southeast Asia and India at Google, and based in Singapore. I was born to immigrants and refugees. My father moved to the US from India in 1965 after his experience of living through the partition of India and Pakistan, with the dream of giving his family a better life. He made his dream come true then 40 years later his daughter moved right back to Asia, in fact to the city where he grew up, New Delhi.
I’ve been in Asia for almost 15 years now – a decade in India and five in Singapore. People express surprise that after being born in America I returned to the land of my ancestors but it’s really not that strange when I look at it through the lens of belonging. For most of my life, I took pride in the fact that I ‘fit in’ in most places, that I was a chameleon as comfortable being in New Delhi as New York. But I realise now that I was trying to make an anxiety into a strength. Through recent conversations I now view ‘fitting in’ as the opposite of belonging and I am finally starting to feel a sense of being at home.
Career-wise, I’d say my experience resembles a jungle gym rather than a ladder. I’ve worked in product development, operations, customer marketing, brand management, luxury and mass marketing in sectors including technology, consulting and financial services, while based in various locations in the US and international markets as part of local, regional and global teams.
I doubt it’s a route anyone would advise you to take if you were starting out, but I also think it’s down to the diversity of experiences I’ve had that I’m where I am today.
Beyond work, I care deeply about making the internet equitable from a gender diversity lens and have been one of the pioneers of the Internet Saathi programme, which has helped over 30 million women gain digital literacy. And I am a mother of fraternal twins. No, life is never boring!
What do you do at Google?
I lead marketing for India and Southeast Asia for Search, Android, YouTube, Maps, Classroom, Google Pay, Play, Google Ads, and all other Google products. In doing so, I work on growing businesses, creating marketing work that breaks through to tell Google’s story in compelling ways, and crafting strategies and building teams in complex and dynamic markets.
My team and responsibility spans 12 countries including India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore, a total of over 100 marketers in eight sites.
Describe a typical day in your life
I wake up and like to go for a walk at the Botanical Gardens with my husband after we drop our twins at the bus stop. This is usually followed by some early calls with California while we overlap with their day and meetings with teams in Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, along with some thinking time. My husband is an amazing cook so he usually prepares brunch/lunch for us. Around this time, India is waking up so my other region starts demanding my attention.
Meetings are about anything from launch plans with product teams, business unit reviews where we review the health of the business, creative reviews with our agency partners and results and metrics with analysts from media campaigns, discussing upcoming regulation with our policy and compliance teams, to sitting on our COVID taskforce, mentoring and career progression, or, as lead of the APAC Diversity Equity and Inclusion team, an all-hands conversation about how we as Google can do more to ensure our work fully reflects our user base.
Beyond meetings, I sit on leadership teams, speak at events, talk with the media, interview future Googlers, listen to customers, review research reports and more.
No day looks the same and my end time varies but I always have dinner with my family no matter what.
How did you find your way into tech?
My mother was actually the first woman in tech I knew. Back in the mid-70s, when I was an infant and computer programming was considered women’s work (think of the movie Hidden Figures), my mom studied at night to become a computer programmer. She would go to classes in the evening, study all night, take exams and somehow still spend all day with me (or so it seemed at least). My dad would come home from work and take the baton from her, looking after me and my sister. I am not sure he ever fully admitted this to his family back in India, but it’s something that I witnessed and I realise today has impacted me greatly.
My mother was my role model so when I was getting my BBA from the University of Michigan I did not hesitate to major in information systems, then when I was at Kellogg for my MBA I focused on tech marketing. I knew early on that I had an aptitude for data information and did not want to do traditional marketing. I think my mom played a large role in this. In consulting, I was one of few women who could code but it didn’t bother me because my mom never complained. She put her head down and worked hard, and I followed in her footsteps
What is the tech scene like in India and Southeast Asia, especially for women?
It varies from market to market. Women founders are rare in India, only six percent of startups have women as their sole founders according to a Reserve Bank of India survey, while our own research with Bain showed less than 20% of enterprises are owned by women.
By contrast, 60% of Indonesia’s MSMEs are owned by women, often micro-enterprises operating from home. For women, entrepreneurship is a solution to the high level of unemployment, providing economic opportunity with the flexibility to take care of domestic care work. The benefits of women entrepreneurship goes even broader, as they are more likely to provide employment for other women and they contribute significantly to the Indonesian economy. It’s a similar case in Vietnam.
The biggest opportunity we can see for women entrepreneurs is with the digital economy thanks to the combination of lower start-up costs and the fact that e-commerce consumers don’t know or care about the gender of the sellers they buy from. This is something that Google is investing in across India and Southeast Asia. Recently in India, we committed to supporting one million women entrepreneurs with relevant skills and support.
How can agencies and brands in APAC be more conscious when it comes to inclusive marketing?
The expectation is now on brands to keep up, moving inclusive marketing from something nice for brands to do to something brands must do. At Google we’re committed to championing change, and we’ve made inclusive marketing a priority across all our marketing efforts through training and education sessions for our teams. Last year, I penned five inclusive marketing principles to help guide us through common challenges we face as marketers, as well as providing examples of brands such as Volvo, Grab and ANZ Bank which are championing these principles for others to follow.
Today, it seems like a cause when brands are thinking about inclusivity. I would love to see the day when this is just how we market and it is not seen as a cause. It is just the right thing to do.
What is your best piece of advice for women wanting to make their mark in tech?
I have had those gremlins in my own head telling me to give up many, many times in my career but thankfully I have also had role models, sponsors and allies who helped me. This is not something anyone can do alone and I hope I can be an ally to more women so we eliminate all those gremlins in our heads together. So my best advice is never, ever think you can NOT do this. Just look for a role model, and latch on.