LYNNFIELD — Three Lynnfield residents are inspiring women to tell their stories.
Since launching their global online media publication centered around the female experience in June, Manju Sheth, her daughter, Shaleen Sheth, and family friend Deepa Jahaveri say they’ve received an overwhelming amount of support from readers who feel the trio have managed to hit on an underserved market.
Women Who Win curates and posts stories from women around the world, covering everything from awe-inspiring journeys of hardship and triumph, to more subtle narratives about training for marathons or launching a vegan food brand.
An idea several years in the making, the three women say it was the COVID-19 pandemic that finally pushed them to make the publication a reality.
“Timing is everything in life. I think we would have done it eventually, but because of COVID, we were all here and we had these ideas,” said Manju, the matriarch of the three. “We wanted to create a very positive platform because during COVID, there’s so much negativity and unhappiness, so (we decided) to bring all these stories together of what people have achieved and (look at) ‘What were the roadblocks? How did they overcome them?’”
Although none of the founders are professional writers themselves — Manju and Deepa are both accomplished doctors, while Shaleen is a recent Babson graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration — the three say their backgrounds have heavily informed their work with Women Who Win, allowing them to draw on connections they’ve made with other inspiring women throughout their careers to help launch the magazine’s first stages.
Manju herself has long nursed a soft spot for media and storytelling, hosting a talk show in her spare time titled Chai with Manju.
“The tagline (of the show) is ‘Every life has a story,’” she said. “If you think about it as a journalist, you’ll see every life has a story, every life has a dream. Whether it’s for you or for somebody else. It could be something simple, like ‘I want to grow a rose plant.’ We all have a dream, so that is what we decided to do.”
Even with her vast experience telling other people’s stories, however, Manju said she was still shocked by the staggering response to Women Who Win.
“We started featuring the stories, then friends heard about (the magazine), then they had their stories to tell,” she said. “Even I, in my 12 years of doing this, was completely amazed with the kinds of stories we received.”
Unlike many other publications, Women Who Win’s content consists entirely of submissions from readers. Once a story is submitted, the team edits the piece before it goes live, working with each author individually to help her tell her story.
Although Shaleen uses her marketing skills to promote the magazine through various online platforms, the three women say it’s the relatability of the stories themselves that draw readers in and makes them eager to share content that resonates.
“It was just going to be a Facebook group or something, and then it became this whole thing really fast,” Shaleen said. “We started building our own website and making a LinkedIn, an Instagram, everything. Even more people got on board once they saw the launch, so it just started to really build up.”
In fact, word of mouth has been an integral part of building the magazine’s readership base. In the few weeks since they first launched, the trio says they’ve received an overwhelming amount of feedback from women wanting to share their own stories after reading about others working toward their dreams and making a difference across the globe.
“I think women always think they’re like a wife, a sister, a mother, you know, these defined roles, and then their little dream is just kind of shuffled somewhere in the middle of that,” Deepa said. “This (project) brings that to the forefront.”
Shaleen agreed.
“A lot of times, women don’t want to share their stories, or they think, ‘Oh, it’s just a pipe dream. It’s never actually going to happen,’” she said. “We really wanted those dreams to be shared on our platform so they can see it actually can happen — that there’s a reality to what they’re saying.”
Women Who Win currently has contributors from 38 countries and counting, including India, Sweden, Morocco, Lebanon and Belarus.
Born and raised in India before coming to the United States for work at different times, Manju and Deepa say representation is an important part of Women Who Win. Not only is it crucial to share women’s stories, but the trio wants to make sure they have contributions from a diverse range of countries, cultures, and ages.
“It’s cool,” Shaleen said. “A lot of people have these stories from around the globe, but they don’t really have an(other) outlet to share them.”
The team itself has found strength in its members’ ages. As a recent college graduate, Shaleen is able to help the team find stories and write headlines that connect with younger readers, while Manju and Deepa find content relevant to readers in a range of different life stages.
“We (each bring) something very different,” Manju said. “We have somebody very young from the millennial generation who was born here. Deepa (who is now in her 40s) was 16 when she came here, and she’s the bridge between us. I am in my 50s, so we brought all these different generations together.”
As a mother of two young children, Deepa said she hopes the stories featured on Women Who Win inspire generations of women.
“I feel like this is a niche,” she said. “There’s not really anything else like it out there, something that has such a wide spread of stories from so many different places.”
Readers can check out Women Who Win’s most recent stories at womenwhowin100.com, or follow their Instagram at the handle: womenwhowin100.