Georgette Tan will be honoured with the Individual Achievement SABRE Award on 24 September 2020, at the virtual Asia-Pacific SABRE Awards.

Tan is currently president of United Women Singapore, a nonprofit organisation advocating gender equality, women’s empowerment and focused on building the pipeline of future female leaders.

She was previously communications SVP at Mastercard where, for over 18 years, she was responsible for external and internal communication, and launched the company's knowledge leadership strategy with the establishment of numerous consumer, lifestyle and gender indexes. She also spearheaded Mastercard’s CSR efforts which focused on education and development programs to help empower women and children across the Asia-Pacific region.

She also spearheaded Mastercard’s CSR efforts – mainly education and development programs to help empower women and children across the region.

Prior to joining Mastercard, Tan was VP of communications at CNBC Asia and Dow Jones Asia, and also held senior communications roles for the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board.

Weber Shandwick client experience chair Vanessa Ho Nikolovski, who served as Tan's regional agency lead during the Mastercard years, noted that Tan had made "huge strides in elevating PR to be a driver of the business."

"Georgette was always looking to ‘push the envelope’, explore what’s next, go where no one had gone before," said Ho Nikolovski. "She’s a big ideas person, always curious, looking for ways to connect the dots and make sense of the zeitgeist.

"Over almost two decades, she made huge strides in elevating PR to be a driver of the business, and forged new paths to reputation building and stakeholder engagement," added Ho Nikolovski. "We worked on many successful programs and campaigns through the years, many of which became global programs for the company, such as the broad and diverse work she spearheaded to build up Mastercard’s knowledge leadership standing among key stakeholders over more than a decade."

In particular, continued Ho Nikolovski, Tan "had the foresight more than a decade ago to start building up the empowerment of women and girls for Mastercard in AP and MEA as an essential component to inclusive growth."

"She has continued to stay true to this cause taking the helm of UN Women after Mastercard, and recently launching a homegrown social impact organization, United Women," said the Weber Shandwick exec. "Georgette is a passionate professional, with an unrelenting sense of purpose. Her work ethic is legendary — always in the trenches, sleeves rolled up — but she puts her heart into what she does and that makes all the difference."

Tan is on the board of the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations (SCWO) and is Chair of BoardAgender, an initiative of SCWO focused on increasing the number of women on boards and senior management positions. She also serves on the Taskforce on Family Violence which is co-chaired by the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). In addition, Tan is on the international advisory panels for a global e-commerce marketplace and a gender-lens VC Fund for Emerging Asia.