Japleen Pasricha, India

Japleen Pasricha has been a storyteller for over a decade and an enabler of women telling their own stories. She founded Feminism in India (FII), an award-winning digital intersectional feminist and bilingual media platform, to create a generation of young women who are aware and educated about feminism and social justice and put a feminist lens on day-to-day current affairs

In this episode, Japleen talks about the everyday inequality she experienced as a student, and how that frustration led her to start FII in 2013, first as a Facebook page. The platform grew from there: a blog, then a full media platform, and then a bilingual platform built around getting women's voices into everyday coverage of current affairs. She built FII with no resources and no formal training, and learnt on the job. Along the way, she found an online community of people who shared her belief in gender equality, and that community helped carry FII forward. She talks about how much she values FII's readers and the feedback they give her. 

The Hindi platform gets specific attention in the conversation. Launching it broke a real linguistic barrier: young readers could suddenly talk to their parents about gender concepts in a language their parents actually read. FII's English site has published more than 10,000 articles; the Hindi site is close to 5,000. Readers use both as research material and as a resource for themselves. 

She also discusses FII's advocacy on reproductive rights and its work pushing back against subconscious victim-blaming, and touches on how her work and research have gained visibility outside India and, increasingly, worldwide. She closes by encouraging young girls and women to trust their own judgment and say what they actually think.