When talking about today’s outlook for women, it’s women who continue to demonstrate that there are no boundaries, no barriers other than their own. They have enormously levelled up the playing field for themselves, shattering stereotypes, breaking barriers and bursting social stigmas. They have braved obstacles and become pioneers in numerous fields, going where “no woman has gone before.”
Certainly, women have been seen creating innovative and successful businesses by overcoming obstacles and social taboos. They continue to inspire and motivate others with their determination and resilience despite facing a lot of challenges. Women have been driving growth and reshaping industries, starting their own businesses and running startup accelerators and incubators. Below is a list of women who have defied their years, social norms, and obstacles to excel in their chosen fields.
Sujata Pawar
Sujata Pawar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Avni, a feminine care and menstrual hygiene brand influenced by Mother Nature, Grandmothers, and Ayurveda to provide toxin-free, functional menstrual care products for women based on flow, body type, and comfort. Sujata’s mission is to deliver organic-based menstrual products in response to commercial brands’ current offerings that exploit women’s bodies and the environment. Sujata has also been holding informative sessions, particularly in rural India, as part of the DAAG project, in which she teams up with local NGOs to promote environmentally friendly menstrual products. Furthermore, she donates 8% of Avni’s profits to empowering women and girls through education and donating high-quality sanitary products.
Harini Ramachandran
Harini Ramachandran, also known as ‘Singer Megha’ in the film industry, is a well-known playback singer who has worked with many prominent music directors, including Academy Award winner A. R. Rahman. She has sung over 75 songs and over 200 commercial jingles in languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, and Oriya. She is the Co-Founder of Antano & Harini, the world’s largest one-on-one mentoring platform, which has resulted in over 50,000 breakthroughs to date. Antano and Harini’s Excellence Installations Technology (EIT) identifies and improves the Core Capabilities needed to Launch a Legacy. “Launch Your Legacy” is the brand’s flagship offering, which empowers a person to launch a legacy in three years that would normally take 10-20 years. Furthermore, her goal is to use NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) technology and its applications to uplift underprivileged children.
Bhawna Bhatnagar
Bhawna Bhatnagar is the Co-Founder of We Founder Circle (WFC), a global community of successful founders and strategic angels with a strong desire to advance the start-up industry. Bhawna has over 8 years of experience in the internet technology sector, including product development, business operations, and content aggregation strategy. In addition, by taking a digital-first approach, she has been instrumental in developing developmental business strategies for many startups, allowing investors from all over the world to allocate funds and partner with startups. This strategic approach is what has prompted the industry to recognise WFC’s efforts, as it has grown to become India’s second-largest Angel Investor Network. Prior to joining WFC, Bhawna worked as an early team member for the global expansion team in ByteDance and Cheetah Mobile, including in China and the United States.
Akanksha Vishnoi
Akanksha, as a young girl growing up in a small town in India, wanted to be the people’s advocate. But her interest and grip on business & brand management, put her on a different route and she became a Lawyer and then an entrepreneur. Eventually, she arrived in her ideal world of branding, where she created, anchored, and maintained her own brand, Yes Madam, with all of its cultural and anthropological truths. She trained herself in “upstream brand thinking”—going beyond communication efforts to address consumers’ more complex business issues within the 3+ years of business experience. She has intensively worked and thought about her brand Yes Madam to revive it, accelerate its growth, maintain its leadership in the category, and expand the brand’s portfolio. She also made sure that Yes Madam transformed from a concept to a brand. With the conviction that she is still developing, she continues to be as passionate about branding as she was when she first entered the industry.
Padmini Murthy
Padmini is a B2B SaaS Marketing expert, across PLG (product-led growth) and enterprises with 15 years of experience across all stages and scales of start-ups. She has taken products to market in record time with successful funding and exits. Further, she chose to run marketing for companies solving pertinent problems with emerging tech – like using AI to build a procurement marketplace, AI to solve e-commerce scale problems for sellers across large, DataOps tools designed for business audiences to parse through large streams of data and get insights. From DevOps/AIOps tools and machine intelligence for e-commerce and marketing, to cloud stack centric products (infra, platform, and B2B apps), and blockchain, she covers a significant spectrum for telling their story. She has founded Organic Marketing, a start-up marketing accelerator, and Content Sense, a tech content shop for social-tech startups. Some of her marketing superpowers included designing and defining a framework-driven content strategy with types of content, messaging maps, personas, and calendars in the mix, establishing a foundational marketing program, managing and modeling marketing data for demand, web performance, self-service growth, digital marketing, and PR, driving large-scale brand refresh projects as the head of marketing, building teams from the ground up and scaling marketing teams and programs to bring accelerated pipeline and product growth.
