The Fast Mode Executive Editor Tara Neal Wins Prestigious GSMA Women Digital Leadership Award
The Fast Mode has announced that its Executive Editor, Tara Neal, has been named a winner of the 2025 Women Digital Leadership Award by the GSMA, the global industry association representing mobile operators and the wider mobile ecosystem.
Presented during the Digital Nation Summit KL, the award celebrates outstanding women leaders who are shaping the digital future. This year’s theme, “Creating Digital Trust and Empowering Women with Inclusive AI,” highlights the vital role of female leadership in building safer digital spaces, addressing gender bias in artificial intelligence, and advancing greater inclusion in technology.
Also featured during the ceremony was Tara’s thought-provoking article for the GSMA Diversity4Tech Blog, “Is ChatGPT a Man, or a Woman? Exploring Gender Bias in GenAI,” which examines how gender imbalances in Internet data influence GenAI outputs and decision-making. The piece reveals how incomplete datasets and historically skewed information can perpetuate bias, exclusion, and misdiagnosis in emerging technologies — and why amplifying women’s voices and data is essential to building fairer, more accurate AI systems.
The award was presented at the Digital Nation Awards & Networking Cocktail, held in the Grand Ballroom of The Westin Kuala Lumpur. The Women Digital Leadership Awards form part of GSMA’s Diversity4Tech initiative, which recognizes and supports female leaders driving digital transformation worldwide. Other honorees included Muntaha Asim, Co-founder and Lead of Aangan; Katherine Ng, Founder and Managing Director of Katashe Solutions; and Chanita Craythorne, Mrs. Thailand World 2025 and Media & Brand Coordinator for Save the Children Thailand.
From left to right: Christina Cheung, GSMA; Chanita Craythorne, Mrs. Thailand World 2025; Jeanette Whyte, GSMA; Muntaha Asim, Aangan; Katherine Ng, Katashe Solutions; Tara Neal, The Fast Mode; Louise Easterbrook, GSMA; Lilian Hung, GSMA.
As Executive Editor and Telecom Strategist of The Fast Mode, Tara brings more than 26 years of experience in research, analysis, and strategy planning. She has led projects on business strategy and performance management and has written extensively on digital services innovation, telecom operator strategies, market trends, and the growth of emerging technology sectors. Tara holds a First-Class Honours degree in BSc Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics and is a CFA charterholder from the CFA Institute, United States.
Tara Neal, Executive Editor and Telecom Strategist, The Fast Mode
I would like to thank the GSMA and other supporting partners for this prestigious award. I feel very honoured to be part of the tech fraternity that is at the forefront of digital transformation initiatives in this region and globally. The collective energy of women—supporting both complex and simple tasks, from grassroots levels to boardroom decisions—has, and will continue to, pave the way for the large waves of digitalization we are witnessing today. This is an important shift in the ideology regarding the success of women in tech, because through the same connectivity infrastructure and digital technologies we have built, we have access to the flexibility that is needed to balance family and work, and to keep contributing to the advancements we see around us.
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