About APEC Women

APEC Women is the virtual meeting place for women — entrepreneurs & businesswomen, academics & researchers, activists & idealists, scientists & technologists, students, homemakers, professionals — who have an interest in social and economic development in Asia and the Asia-Pacific region.

The need for such a meeting place became evident to me while attending the Digital Economy Forum for Women (DEW) and APEC Women Leaders Network (WLN) meeting in June, 2007. The annual cycle of both DEW and WLN meeting means that there is no natural momentum to strengthen connections established at these meetings. Complementary online tools immediately came to mind to enable participants to these meetings to engage with each other — before, during and after these meetings.

APEC Women was initially conceived in this context. But then why stop there? There are many women in the APEC economies who are unable to make it to DEW and WLN for one reason or another. And what about women in non-APEC economies within our region? Why not aim higher? And so I have ….. APEC Women aims to become the go-to site for women who are involved or want to be involved in various aspects of social and economic development in Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. A first iteration of this site was soft-launched in early December 2007 but was discontinued a few months later. Now APEC Women is back up again … this time, for good.

The current Twitter-inspired interface is deliberate to make it easy for users to post to the site. The free flowing format produces rich materials for a more nuanced understanding of issues on users' minds. These will be useful guides to me as I continue developing the site. For what you see now is only a start, and not the final destination.

I hope that we find each other here. And having found each other, I hope that we will then work together, leveraging off each other's capabilities, to achieve concrete outcomes, particularly for women, in our part of the world.

Here's hoping that you find this site useful. And if you do, don't forget to spread the word!

About the author

Grace Chu Te I have been involved with WLN since 2007 and now manage WLN's official website at apecWLN.org. I started getting into e-things (and became irreversibly "addicted" to them) in 2004 after a professional lifetime as a business/economic analyst. With APEC Women I'm trying to build an online community where we can meet and connect so that we can do small and big things together that help improve the status of women everywhere.

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