Speech by Minister Josephine Teo at Microsoft and SGWiT International Women’s Day 2025

Good afternoon, everyone. Happy International Women’s Day!

Thank you, Ms Andrea Della Mattea, for sharing with us the exciting developments that Microsoft is bringing to this part of the world. I also want to acknowledge Ms Lee Hui Li, Dr Sun Su Mei and my colleague, Ms Lee Wan Sie who has been championing the SG Women in Tech movement in Singapore.

I am delighted to take part in this event, not least because Microsoft has been an excellent partner to the Singapore Government in so many aspects; and this goes a long way back. In fact, last week in Parliament, I spoke about the effort of Microsoft, in partnership with NTUC LearningHub, to scale up 100,000 workers in Singapore with AI relevant skills.

In Parliament, I also shared what we were hoping to do to strengthen our AI workforce.

It is useful to now take a step back and reflect what these announcements mean in the context of women's development. We know for a fact that in developing the AI workforce, there is still so much that needs to be done. Fortunately, we are making good progress in terms of growing the pool of AI users. We are also on track in growing the pool of AI practitioners, who are workers in tech specialist roles. We had set out a modest target of tripling the pool of AI practitioners in Singapore over the course of five years, and last year the pool grew 25%. We are still at the early part of the curve. We hope that it picks up pace, and I have every reason to be optimistic about that.

It is very important to us to be open and inclusive when expanding AI opportunities. By that we mean we want women, as well as those with no tech background, to enable them to take on these AI opportunities. We have seen through some of the programmes that it is possible to avail opportunities to more workers, and we want to continue that.

In Parliament last week, we also spoke about introducing a new legislation called the Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Bill this year. Why is this important to women? Because inevitably, when we go online, we sometimes encounter online harms. The victims of online harms are often women, and they deserve our support. With this new legislation, we will also set up a new agency to support such victims.

Those were two of the many announcements in Parliament last week that support women's development.

It is very encouraging that we see an industry that is motivated and forward-leaning in supporting economy-wide AI adoption. This is because all the good things that the Government does – invest in infrastructure, skill up our workforce – will come to naught if there is no widespread AI adoption. So, growing demand in a responsible and sustainable way has always been at the back of our minds.

Therefore, Microsoft’s announcement on expanding your AI Pinnacle programme to drive AI adoption in enterprises, particularly with SMEs that stand to gain so much from this transformative technology, are most welcome.

I would, however, like to highlight something that is already well known to you. It is the fact that there are more men than women in the tech sector; and within the tech sector, technical roles are more often than not performed by men rather than women.

a) What do the statistics look like in Southeast Asia? Women account for 20 to 30% of those employed in technical roles. This is decent but can be better.

b) When we look at the leadership level, leaders of technical teams, only 8% are women. Now I believe you will agree with me that women are more capable than that.

c) This is also the case in fast-growing areas like AI. Globally, of workers that have AI skills, less than one-third are females. When we look closer at specialist AI roles, it is around 20%.

I am always a proponent of the idea that men are our allies. I must state categorically that we do not have a problem with men in technical roles, or we think that men are somehow preventing women from succeeding. It is simply to acknowledge that for whatever reasons, there are gaps, and we can see them as opportunities for us to better support women and girls. On that basis, I'm very happy about Microsoft expanding your Code without Barriers programme in Singapore.

One of the things that we are concerned about are women in tech leaving the workforce. This is because tech develops so quickly, and by the time they are ready to return to the workforce, their skills are often obsolete, and they face a tremendous pressure of not having kept up in their skills. Hence, In November last year, I had also announced a collaboration also with NTUC LearningHub, called RELAUNCH. This was to empower women to return more confidently to the tech workforce. Since then, more than 500 women have already benefited from RELAUNCH.

Let's continue to think of how much more we can do, as all these initiatives add up and help to increase diversity in all roles, whether technical or non-technical, and senior or not-so senior.

Beyond gender inclusivity, we are also familiar with the rich racial, cultural and linguistic diversity in our part of the world, and the need to represent them in any AI model that we develop.

a. MERaLiON is built on SEA-LION, which stands for South East Asian Languages in One Network. It's Singapore’s own LLM and its fundamental objective was to see how we could achieve the objective of cultural representation.

b. This is given that LLMs are primarily in English language. But in Southeast Asia, there are more than 1,200 languages and dialects. If your bot is trained on an LLM that does not understand local languages, you can imagine the serious problem it can cause.

c. SEA has our own colloquial expressions. We have our own ways of getting the message across, and a model is only as good as the richness of the languages that it seeks to serve.

I'm glad that this partnership will put MERaLiON into Microsoft’s tools, which are delivered to the broadest range of users. This means that your customers are going to be better served.

I also happen to meet the team that was involved in MERaLiON’s development. I asked them, “How is the large language model empathetic?” The investigators told me that it is beginning to show signs of being able to discern emotions, such as if we sound irritated. It's often that customers are irritated when they call customer service. The model is able to pick up signals like that and respond appropriately. That is just one of the wonderful applications.

I'm glad that many of the milestones we are witnessing in today’s projects have been driven by very capable women. These include the Principle Investigators behind MERaLiON, Nancy and Ai Ti. I must also say that the Microsoft team has always had very capable and forward leaning progressive women. Thank you to Hui Li and Andrea for the leadership that you have exercised.

You, as well as all the women in this room, are living examples of the strengths that we can bring to every team that we are part of. You are great reminders of the important role that women can play in the workplace, in the boardroom, in the products that we deliver to multiple communities. I sincerely hope we will all continue to encourage more women to be leaders, wherever you are.

On that positive note, I thank you once again for inviting me, and I wish you a fruitful, inspiring, International Women's Day celebration.