Passionate about empowering women and those from diverse backgrounds, business leader and former senior Big 4 partner Karen Loon talks about the challenges of the leadership journey and why it is important to look to the past in order to move forward
When Karen Loon first entered the workforce, the fourth‐generation Asian Australian noticed that there were neither female nor Asian partners in the assurance division of her firm, Price Waterhouse (now known as PwC) in Sydney.
Soon after, the chartered accountant embarked on a two‐year secondment with the firm in Singapore, where, conversely, there were several female partners—some of whom were working mothers. This was a big plus and motivation for Loon, who decided to move to Singapore to build her career and has been based here since.
She worked her way up within leading financial institutions by 33, made partner at PwC. Currently, she is a non‐executive director and an independent director at Bank Pictet & Cie (Asia) and a member of the governing council at the Singapore Institute of Directors. For eight years until June 2022, she was also a committee member of BoardAgender, an initiative of the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations working to advance more women into senior leadership roles and boardrooms in Singapore.
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In August last year, Loon published a book titled Fostering Culturally Diverse Leadership in Organisations, which is largely based on research and the experiences of Asian Australians, including herself. While she believes Singapore is more diverse than Australia and many other countries, it still has its own unique challenges.
One important aspect of diversity in leadership Loon is passionate about is getting more women on boards, which she actively champions here. “In Singapore, we’ve made progress in increasing the proportion of female directors on our boards. However, it has been slower than [that] in many other countries,” she points out.
According to the Council for Board Diversity, women’s participation on the boards of the top 100 primary‐listed companies in Singapore stood at 20.8 per cent as of June 2022, up from 18.9 per cent in December 2021. While this is encouraging, Loon thinks the figure should be higher, given that Singapore has the highest representation of women in CEO positions worldwide (a 2022 Deloitte report showed that when it comes to the percentage of chief executive roles held by women, Singapore topped the list globally at 13.1 per cent in 2021).
“We definitely have plenty of talented and capable women ready to take on board roles. However, a challenge is that boards tend to be more comfortable recruiting new directors who bring certainty of skills and insights,” explains Loon. “Given the evolving business environment, board chairs and nominating committees need to look wider and be more open to new and different types of directors who bring fresh insights and diverse thinking to boardrooms, which women can do.”