Shaili Chopra, a journalist turned entrepreneur and author, is the founder and CEO of SheThePeople, India’s largest digital media platform dedicated to bringing inspiring stories of women into the limelight.
“India could do a lot better if only it treated its women better. How difficult can that be?”
Women are power, women are strength. Women are everything you need to prosper. Yet, women are misrepresented in all walks of life. People fail to take notice of their powerful stories, leaving them feeling underrepresented.
Shaili Chopra aims at breaking appalling stereotypes associated with women and shining a light on the powerful stories of powerful women.
SheThePeople explores the colourful, yet dark spectrum of stories ranging from sexuality, entertainment, women empowerment, leadership, and entrepreneurship to the unjust patriarchy, social issues that women face, violation of women’s rights and much more.
Inspiring Life Story of Shaili Chopra
Born on 21st July 1981 in Jalandhar, Punjab, Shaili has a BA Honours Degree in Economics from Sri Venkateswara College in Delhi. After having graduated, she went on to work with popular news channels like NDTV, Economics Times Now, and CNBC for almost two decades.
Having anchored shows like the ones mentioned, she has extensive experience in journalism and knows how to capture people’s attention.
She had a lot going for her which might lead to one follow-up question. Why would a woman with an incredibly successful career suddenly take up a pivotal decision to leave her remunerative job?
Well, it all began after she was asked to interview Warren Buffett, a business magnate. She was pretty excited to have a chance to interview him, but by the time the interview was over, by no fault of his, she came out of the discussion thinking about where the women were.
She had an epiphany about women in business and how much of an impact underrepresentation had on women’s stories. She said, “I want to tell stories about women because I don’t find them around me.”
Interestingly, she quit her job then and there to dedicate her entire life to telling stories about women and that’s how SheThePeople was born in January 2015.
She says, “Back when I started building the platform, there was no conversation about women. Forget about sexual health and reproductive rights, these were not even things people spoke about. They were for research papers.”
Success Story of SheThePeople.tv
A platform that started with Shaili interviewing women about their everyday lives and everyday successes, is now a platform that has empathetically conveyed more than 50,000 stories about all aspects of being a woman.
It also has a YouTube channel called SheThePeople TV with over 800,000 subscribers. It serves as a comfort zone for women to explore their unfathomably unique bodies and provides content related to health and fitness, entertainment, and more girl talk. [because who says no to girl talk?]
Many people doubted her career shift but today after so many tireless years, those voices questioning her abrupt but rewarding decisions can finally be silenced, given the amount of success, she’s attained.
A woman encouraging other women to live their lives on their own terms, and to raise their powerful voices against those of oppression and inequality, is bound to make the world a better place for them.
Becoming an Author
Along with being an entrepreneur, Shaili Chopra has 5 books under her belt. Feminist Rani, The Big Connect, Birdies in Business, etc. are some of her popular books.
Sisterhood Economy, her latest book, was published on 18th August 2022. In order to perfectly craft the book, she travelled to multiple places all over India to scrutinize the different stereotypes that women battle on a daily basis. In this book, she aims to understand the women’s economy and takes a look at how women are contributing, where they are yet untapped and how their approach to work is rewarding for the country.
