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South China Morning Post

This week in PostMag: 5 women leading the way in STEM, a woman who started a brewery at 18, and a trip to Luang Prabang in Laos

I am laughably bad at maths. I like to think of it as an endearing quality – a framing only possible because I live in an era of calculators on mobile phones. And to my credit, once you put letters in there, shockingly I improve. Calculus and trigonometry? I could scrape by in high school. Splitting a bill at the end of dinner? Don't look at me. Advertisement So, there's no one I'm more in awe of than women in mathematics, science and related disciplines, and the topic immediately sprang to mind when we were discussing how to mark International Women's Day in an editorial meeting a few months back. But, to be honest, we were conflicted about the idea on the whole. International Women's Day is somewhat of a Hallmark holiday – cringeworthy promotions abound, the critical issues get overlooked and the descent is quick into 'rah rah, girl power' territory. We wanted to make sure we championed the brilliant women innovating in their fields, but we also didn't want to shy away from discussing the hard questions, the challenges and the solutions. After the cover shoot, we brought our five cover stars – Florence Chan, Angela Wu, Wendy Lam, Gina Jiang and Megan Lam – together for a round-table discussion of women in STEM, which you can read in its edited and condensed form. It ended up being one of the most provocative and enjoyable Friday afternoons I've had in a long while. The work they are doing is fascinating and while we didn't solve the world's problems in a single conversation, I learned so much from their insights and approaches. A sincere thanks to Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, which supported this editorial feature. Anushka Purohit, of Breer, the food upcycling start-up that turns leftover bread into beer, shares about being a woman founder in a male-dominated industry. Who would have guessed that about beer brewing? And there was the challenge of youth, too. Purohit was 18 when she started the company five years ago. One point our cover stars touched on in conversation is that science and technology shouldn't be so siloed from art and humanities. It ought to be STEAM not STEM, they laughed. Artists, for their part, haven't shied away from using technology. Aaina Bhargava talks to South Korean artist Inhwa Yeom, who uses artificial intelligence as a foundational element of her practice. She's showing as part of 'Future Tense', an exhibition that explores Hong Kong's cultural heritage reimagined in the future. Advertisement That reimagining is, of course, all speculative. How can we actually predict what something will look like in the future? Ron Gluckman first visited Luang Prabang in the early 1990s and could he have imagined what it would look like now? He traces the city's evolution as a destination over 30 years. One for the bucket list, especially with its 'Sundance of Southeast Asia' film festival.