On Ms Lim Shoon Yin, a title feels less like a medal than a backpack: practical, weighty and carried without fuss.
When she became executive director of Singapore women’s rights group Aware on Jan 1, she did not come by the usual activist path of community organising, lobbying and years of committee-room battles. Instead, the former DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) professional arrived from petrol stations, boardrooms, factory floors and diversity workshops.
What the 51-year-old brought with her was more than corporate experience at multinational organisations such as Shell, Microsoft and Russell Reynolds Associates. She brought an instinct for how systems work, an eye for what others miss, and a habit of asking a simple question: who is missing from the picture?
That instinct was formed long before the acronym of DEI became a corporate buzzword or entered the mainstream.
It began in childhood. Her parents’ marriage broke up when Ms Lim was 10, and her mother, a government scholar who had worked at the Ministry of National Development before joining her husband’s architectural practice, became the family’s anchor.
What followed was a tough stretch of rented homes, long working days and after-school hours spent waiting in offices. The eldest of three children, she learnt early that adulthood was something to shoulder, not something to wait for.
“One important KPI was: don’t let the teachers call my mum.”
Just as important, she says, was finding ways to become independent and financially self-sufficient. Scholarships, holiday jobs, anything that could help, she would take on. The school swimmer and track athlete spent breaks doing whatever work came her way, from wrapping gifts at Raffles City to carrying out administrative duties at DBS Securities.
An alumna of CHIJ Toa Payoh and National Junior College, she won scholarships whenever she could, and eventually secured one from Shell that took her to the National University of Singapore.
She had first set her sights on chemical engineering, the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) path many bright girls were nudged towards in those days. But when her A-level results arrived, she decided to switch to business administration. They were, she says, “not disastrous… but not what I would want to build engineering on”.
Shell not only agreed but kept the scholarship terms.
“It told me they saw something beyond the grades. And it gave me permission to trust my own instincts about fit,” says Ms Lim, who graduated with first-class honours in 1998.
Her first years in Shell offered the kind of humility no leadership course can teach. As part of her early training, she spent time in petrol stations: pumping fuel, manning the cash register, washing cars and learning the business from the ground up.
“For the taxi uncles, I was this young woman at the pump. They’d ask: ‘Xiao mei (little sister), what are you doing here?’ But it was the best way to learn the business.”
The only woman in the operations team then, she says the experience never quite left her. It taught her that any leader worth listening to must first understand the people on the front line.
“They’re the reason you earn a salary in the corporate head office. But they’re often overlooked and not well supported,” says Ms Lim, adding that it later shaped her approach to DEI.
Even after she moved into more strategic roles – operations, marketing communications, transformation and business planning – in different organisations, she insisted on going to factory and shop floors before designing programmes.
At Swiss fragrance giant Givaudan, for instance, she requested time on the production line, donning safety gear to mix ingredients side by side with technicians. It was how she noticed that the job was designed in a way that excluded most women, and also caused injury to men.
“There were 20kg and 30kg containers, which only the men were handling, and a few 1kg and 5kg ones they gave me,” she says. “I told them: ‘I’m a rescue diver and as part of my certification, I had to pull a grown man out of the water. I can lift 20kg, 30kg. But more importantly, look at all your guys – back braces, elbow braces, wrist braces.’”
Ms Lim (far left) with friends on a dive trip in Pulau Weh, Indonesia, in 2018.
PHOTO: LIM SHOON YIN
Her suggestion for a fix was simple: redesign the containers to 10kg and refill them more often.
“By being inclusive for women, we can actually make it better for the men,” she says.
Ms Lim’s entry into formal diversity work came in 2008, when she became Shell’s second Asia-Pacific diversity manager. Back then, the field was still new enough for people to assume a “diversity manager” belonged somewhere in finance, mistaking diversity for diversification and acquisition.
She joined a small informal network of about eight diversity heads from mostly US multinationals – banks, technology and professional services firms – trying to figure out how to apply American diversity agendas in Asian cultures where LGBT issues were sensitive and disability was poorly understood.
