Shweta Ganiger

I come from a community where opportunities for girls were limited and boys were often encouraged to dream big. I considered that entire challenge as my motivation, and during my school years, I started topping every grade and got a state rank in my high school. I became the first woman from my entire community to attend a national college back in India after being selected from over 1 million students. Coming from a background without formal tutoring for these exams was challenging because my peers came from big cities and had exposure to good coaching institutes, so I just relied on my resilience and took all the help possible. What I learned there was asking for help, and I'm very happy to share that I graduated among the top five in my class. During my undergrad days, I was more of a research kid and published research papers and worked with research institutes. During my third year, ExxonMobil came on campus and I interviewed for them. I didn't know I would get through, but I did, and I started my career at Exxon. The main reason I stayed with ExxonMobil was because of its open-door policy and the culture it has, and especially, I found the women leaders there extremely inspiring, whose career path I would always look up to. I've been working with ExxonMobil for almost 5 years now. Alongside my corporate career, I'm also an entrepreneur and have co-founded a retail pharmacy business back in India, which I started during COVID time close to 6 years ago. We observed that there were not many pharmacies in the rural part of India where we operate, and the few pharmacies that were around were overcharging customers, especially rural women, because the hospital there was mainly for women on the gynecologist side. We wanted to provide affordable medicines to them and cut out the middleman advantage that was being taken. We don't maximize our profits but try to provide medicines at a very affordable rate to these underprivileged women, and whatever profits we make, we give back by organizing free bone density and PCOS camps where we educate and empower women. We have conducted almost 6 to 7 healthcare camps and helped more than 1,000 women.