Our mandate, as we state on our newly minted website, is the following:
Founded in 2024, Women in Governance is a global community of women board leaders in international schools, championing excellence in governance and educational leadership through peer support, the exchange of diverse best practices, lifelong learning, and purposeful connection. Behind this abstract statement of purpose, however, is a very real sense that we are doing something very new, even perhaps revolutionary, as we help shape the future of international education in the Asia-Pacific region. For one, we are acutely aware that our Heads of School have their own communities where they share information about everything from AI in K-12 education to compensation trends to common challenges associated with board continuity. Until now, Board Chairs haven’t had a comparable forum for communication and sharing. For another, we are aware that it is a powerful move to bring together five women leaders who bring diverse individual perspectives and voices based upon their lived experience in and out of Asia as well as their professional backgrounds. Between the five of us, we sport decades of life in Asia, the United States, and Europe; multiple Ivy League professional and doctoral degrees; and long-term careers in business, law, and higher education. One of us even has an ancestral chateau in France to boast of! A recent report from the World Economic Forum states that gender equality is 123 years away. And when we ask AI to produce images of boardrooms, we rarely see our own images– as (mostly Asian) women of a certain age–reflected in the output. This is why WIG is powerful: because it provides a space where Board Chairs of major international schools in the Asia-Pacific region come together in solidarity over ethnicity, gender, and our dedication to the schools that we help direct. After our initial meeting at GALTI in September 2024 in Hanoi, we met again as a group at EARCOS Leadership Conference (ELC) in Bangkok a month later, and then we went on a site visit to one of our schools, Taipei American School (TAS), in May 2025. TAS was a terrific host, inviting us to their school-wide professional development workshop and providing us with WIG-tailored small-group training with their visiting speakers. It was there in Taipei that we also decided to share our story at the next ELC, and where we ended up proposing and presenting at a session entitled “Common Ground, Unique Paths: Insights and Lessons from International School Boards.” In this debut appearance at the ELC, we shared stories grounded in our individual schools but that reflected universal concerns of EARCOS schools. Our five testimonials centered around topics on cultivating the Board Chair’s relationship with the HOS; managing the various expectations placed on Board Chairs; how Boards can contribute to curricular innovation; what effective Board training looks like; and how Boards work together with school administrators even as we navigate our separate lanes. We invited Homa Tavangar to serve as our moderator, and the entire session was intended to share insight into how Boards think as we go about our work. For our first panel appearance at ELC, we were secretly thrilled to discover that our session had to be moved to a larger meeting room because so many people signed up in advance to attend our session.
in our roles. At odd hours of the day or night, we will ask each other arcane questions over WhatsApp, questions that no one but a fellow Board Chair in the region would ever care about. Do your TAs get tuition discounts? What number Board Chair are you, for your HOS? Is such-and-such rumor about your school, in fact, true? And while we share information and swap stories, we have chosen to bind ourselves by a signed confidentiality agreement. (Or, truth be told, the lawyer among us made us sign it!) But over the past year-plus, our community has flowered into a lot more than that. When one of us went through a health crisis, we all bonded and powwowed on how we could show our support (could we secretly contact her HOS for a home address where we can send flowers?) and ended up getting her a rare initialed mini-labubu as a “so glad you’re better” gift (and if you know, you know). And we’ve made time for each other outside of our official meetings–we’ve crashed parties in Seoul, sampled coffee in Kuala Lumpur, and bonded over late-night nachos in Chicago. Oh, and for our debut panel at Bangkok, we all wore matching silk scarves, freshly manufactured in Shanghai and printed with our “official” WIG logo, just in time for the ELC. What does the future hold for WIG? Our honest answer is that we haven’t the faintest idea. We are aware that our community-building is important, ground-breaking, and also fragile. Our terms as Board Chairs are finite, and we discuss expansion and succession plans (should we welcome new members? Is it more important that they are Board Chairs or that they are women? What happens when many of us, founding members, are no longer Board Chairs of our respective schools?) We are, of course, in touch with other Board Chairs and members beyond our five schools. We don’t have the answers to our questions, but we have come so far in the last year or so, and we expect continuing growth and evolution. Right now, we revel in our community of support, information-sharing, and friendship. We are grateful, and when that WIG WhatsApp pings, day or night, we answer right away. Women in Governance can be reached at wigovorg@gmail.com. About the Authors Dr. Hyungji Park (Board Chair, Seoul Foreign School), Anna-Marie Pampellonne (Board Chair, International School of Kuala Lumpur), Emily Chan (Board Chair, Shanghai American School), Dr. Grace Lee (Board Chair, Taipei American School), and Maria S. Chung (Board Chair, United Nations International School of Hanoi) bring together extensive leadership experience from some of the most respected international schools in the region. Their collective perspectives reflect a deep commitment to educational excellence, governance, and the advancement of global learning communities.
Our fellowship as WIG started as a way to help our work as Board Chairs. Sometimes isolated, sometimes lonely, we also found ourselves with limited access to information needed to succeed Winter 2025 Issue 11