By Amy Tiang

“Across our region, women perform the vast majority of unpaid care work at home, yet remain significantly underrepresented in leadership across male-dominated industries. The numbers don't lie. The question is what we do about them.”

It may seem counterintuitive to read a piece about Women in Security in April, particularly now that International Women’s Day has already come and gone.

That said, I write this now, deliberately, because conversations like these must continue beyond moments or months in a calendar.

Last week, I was fortunate to be a part of a Women in Security forum in Manila, hosted by HID and ASIS Philippines.

The room was full of women who have built careers in security, one of the most male-dominated fields in the world. As we shared our journeys, one particular dataset stood out, and stayed with me since.

The datapoint, reported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in its 2024 Report for Southeast Asia, found that across the region, women spend 3.1 times more hours than men on unpaid care and domestic work, or 3.3 hours daily compared to just one hour for men.

The report also stated that the divide didn't just persist between 2014 and 2022 – it worsened.

In professional spaces, the picture looks no less uneven. Women make up just 25 per cent of the physical security workforce globally and hold only 31 per cent of leadership roles.

Across Southeast Asia, fewer than 20 per cent of board seats are held by women. Yet, at entry-level positions, the numbers tell a different story: women account for close to half of all entry-level positions, globally, but only a quarter reach C-suite roles.

Decisiveness seen as aggressive

The contradiction is hard to ignore. The decisiveness that makes a woman an exceptional caregiver at home is too often read as "aggressive" in the workplace.

The ability to manage competing demands, make decisions under pressure and hold complexity together is treated as expected in private life, yet frequently overlooked in leadership pipelines.

Women are trusted to hold so much together – yet too often remain outside the rooms where important decisions are made.

The issue is rarely capability. More often, it is how capability is seen, attributed, and sponsored within leadership systems.

Too often, women are trusted to deliver outcomes but not consistently positioned in the rooms where strategic visibility turns performance into progression.

"Being opinionated and honest is considered a sign of strong character – but it is not always welcome. The same trait reads differently depending on the room you are in."

I have spent more than 15 years across tech and adjacent industries before finding my way into security.

When HID opened that door for me, it was a reminder that opportunity in this industry rarely announces itself; someone has to actively choose to see potential where others have quietly applied a ceiling.

That decision, made by individuals, by organisations, and by industry bodies like ASIS, matters more than any awareness campaign ever will.

That said, the harder work cannot be outsourced to goodwill. I have learned to treat every dismissal as information rather than verdict. Every time I was underestimated, I asked myself what the other person saw – and whether it was a perception I could shift, or a bias I simply had to build past.

Most of the time, it was both. The women I most respect in this industry did not wait for the room to become comfortable. They built credibility in the spaces they were given, until the centre became too uncomfortable to ignore them.

To younger women in security – or any field not designed with them in mind – my advice is simple: find your community before you need it.

The support structures that keep women in difficult industries are built in the good moments and tested in the hard ones.

Communities find their voice

Across Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia, communities are beginning to form and find their voice. They need more people in them, not fewer.

For those in Malaysia who are finding their way into this industry, or considering it, there are now more spaces than before to step into the conversation.

Communities like ASIS Malaysia are organising spaces for industry in Malaysia to connect, share, and learn from one another, in ways that did not exist a decade ago.

Sometimes, simply showing up and being amongst others in these spaces can be where the shift begins, because it reminds us that we are not building or enacting change alone.

The future of women in security in this region will not be shaped by a single panel event in March, or a byline in April.

It will be shaped by whether women in this industry continue to show up – visibly, specifically, and on their own terms – until the room no longer feels like it was designed for someone else; until “Women in Security” stops being a niche conversation, and becomes simply the industry.

We are not there yet. But increasingly, we are no longer waiting for permission.

-- BERNAMA

Amy Tiang is Regional MarCom & Channel Marketing Manager at HID.