“Women’s empowerment starts at home,” CNN International senior vice president and Asia Pacific managing editor, Ellana Lee, said in Singapore last week during the Asia Media Woman of the Year Award event.

Accepting this year’s award, Lee said that “of all the years to win this award, the significance of 2018 does not escape me... women have mustered the courage to tell their horrifying stories, and also to find a global community of women and men to come out to support them and start to right some of the wrongs that exist today.”

Now in its sixth year, the ContentAsia award recognises the outstanding achievements of female leaders in the media industry in Asia.

Lee is CNN International’s most senior person outside of the U.S., and is also the global head of CNN Vision, which produces more than 1,300+ hours of original long- and short-form content.

Lee said “the stories that we have told and have had the privilege of telling at CNN”, coupled with her personal experience, led her to believe that women’s empowerment starts at home.

She spoke about growing up in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, where “girls didn’t have much advantage” and where boys were born with a lot moreprivilege just because they were sons.

Boys’ existence was legitimate, and family records dating back hundreds of years reflected only boys names, she added.

Lee said her curiosity about why her name wasn’t recorded in the family book, “clearly suggesting an injustice in not seeing my name there”, was the beginning of her career as a journalist.

“I was told very simply, by the elders, that I was a girl and that eventually I would marry out of the Lee family and so I had no place in the family book. And it was true. I couldn’t find any of my female cousins’ names in the book,” Lee said, adding: “It wasn’t personal. It was just tradition. But that moment left an indelible impression me”.

She said her advantage “in looking at the world slightly differently”, was her mother.

“No one in this world has shaped me more than my mother. And no one has shaped me to be the woman of today’s time other than my mother,” she said. Lee’s mother was the youngest of five girls.

“What made the difference for my mother is that my grandfather had a dream for her, and that was to educate her in the United States in the 1960s, less than 15 years after the end of the Korean War, to become a professional journalist”.

“This approval from my grandfather was a watershed moment for my family... Of course it took five girls to come to this conclusion, but he did come to it,” she said.

Lee’s mother eventually returned to Korea and chose a career in public service.

“She worked throughout my childhood and I know specifically that that made a big difference in my upbringing because that determined how I saw women’s role in society. I thought it was very natural for women and mothers to work.

“What I didn’t realise until I was a more mature age was how difficult it was for a woman of my mother’s generation to work. How difficult it was for her to be given the same education as a male and for the family to invest in her education, especially abroad, and to come back to raise a family and to even think that she could have a career,” Lee said.

Not equating women’s empowerment to being a journalist, being in public service or having a career, she said women’s empowerment to her was about having choices.

“Thanks to my grandfather’s vision, by the time it was time for me to make a decision, I had family support to study in the U.S. and to find my way to CNN in New York City,” she said.

“What I discovered at CNN, unlike my own family tree, was that I had a name and an identity. I wasn’t just a girl and I wasn’t such-and-such’s daughter.

“Instead, I was Ellana Lee trying to be an aspiring journalist. And that was my identity. With the support of my bosses and colleagues, both male and female, that is who I am today.

“The privilege of working at CNN is that you get to work with some of the top journalists around the world. They are inspiring, fearless, super smart and incredible charismatic and yes, many of them are women.

“Our female correspondents are often the first ones to raise their hands to go cover a story in some horrific places stretching from Afghanistan to Syria. So today’s award, is really about each and every one of them.”

Lee closed her address by saying that although it had taken decades to achieve, women in her family today had claimed their rightful place in the Lee family book.

Presenting the award, ContentAsia’s publisher and editorial director, Janine Stein, described Lee as fearless, a trail-blazer and a game changer.

“We are living in extraordinary times, when the media is under constant attack. The term ‘fake news’ is part of our every day and the challenge of making sense out of the deluge of information coming at us all the time can seem insurmountable,” Stein said.

“There has never been a more important time for journalism or a more important time for strong, unbiased leadership. Ellana ticks all the boxes,” she added.

Published on ContentAsia eNewsletter, 3 September 2018