'Every Day Is Women's Day': Shaili Chopra On Visibility, Agency & Community

For a long time, conversations around women and their issues and interests were framed as 'too niche', reserved for the customary International Women's Day panel discussions. Shaili Chopra wanted to change that. When she founded SheThePeople in 2015, the idea was simple but radical: create a platform where women’s stories were not confined to special occasions, but to the mainstream. 

Over the past decade, SheThePeople has evolved from storytelling to network-building, connecting women across industries and geographies so they could learn from and support one another. But Shaili's ambitions did not stop there. In 2022, she launched Gytree, a health-tech platform designed to address another long-standing gap: women’s wellness that is accessible, reliable, and stigma-free. 

Taken together, these ventures reflect her broader mission: giving women agency over their voice, their health, and their lives. In this interview, Shaili Chopra speaks about the journey from journalism to entrepreneurship, the evolution of SheThePeople and Gytree, and why she believes the next frontier lies in transforming how women access knowledge, networks, and support systems.

In Conversation With Shaili Chopra

SheThePeople: You often say, "Every day is Women's Day at SheThePeople." Why is it important for you to keep showing up after all these years?

Shaili Chopra: Honestly? Because the work isn't done. And I say that not from exhaustion but from genuine restlessness. Every time I think we've made a dent, I meet a woman whose story has never been told, whose name has never been in a headline, who has been quietly doing extraordinary things in complete silence. That's what pulls me back in.

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But I'll also be honest about something people don't ask enough. There are days I'm tired; days I wonder if we're actually moving the needle or just making noise. And then something happens: a woman from a small town tells me she started her business because she saw someone like her on our platform, and I remember why I built this.

SheThePeople was never about one day a year or one month of pink graphics. It was built on the belief that sustained and consistent visibility changes what the world thinks is normal. I'm very stubborn about normal.

SheThePeople: In the age of influence, AI, and instant gratification, how do you strike a balance between meaningful conversations and engagement at SheThePeople?

Shaili Chopra: I'll be real, I don't always get it right. There are days the algorithm wants a reel, and I want a 3,000-word essay, and we have a little standoff. Usually, the reel wins. I'm working on my feelings about that. 

But what I keep coming back to is trust. Women came to SheThePeople because we weren't performing feminism, we were practising it. So even when the format changes, the contract with our community doesn't. AI genuinely excites me because it can help us reach more women faster, in more languages, at a scale I couldn't have imagined when I started with a phone and a ring light.

But no algorithm is going to replace a real woman telling her real story in her own words. -Shaili Chopra

That's still the most powerful piece of content I know. Everything else is just distribution.

SheThePeople: What is one assumption about women's empowerment or feminism that you think the business ecosystem still gets wrong?

Shaili Chopra: That the woman in the room needs to represent all women before she gets to represent herself. I have walked into so many boardrooms and pitches where I was expected to speak for every woman in India before anyone would take my business seriously. No man pitching a logistics startup has ever been asked to represent all of male India first. It's exhausting, and it's absurd.

The real miss isn't that business doesn't care about women. It's that they still see us as a monolith. -Shaili Chopra. 

My platform is multilingual because Indian women are not one woman. We are not one story, one problem, one solution. The moment a boardroom truly understands that, we stop being a cause and start being the largest underserved market in the room. Which we have always been. 

SheThePeople: Your commitment to advancing women's health has evolved into Gytree. How do you see it
changing the way women approach wellbeing today?

Shaili Chopra: Gytree came from a very personal place. I was running a platform for millions of women and realising that so many of us were managing our health exactly the way we manage everything else, by pushing through, by Googling symptoms at midnight, by apologising for needing to slow down. We had built this incredible community, and I kept thinking, what is the point of all this ambition if your body gives out on you before you get there?

Gytree is about changing the relationship women have with their own health from reactive to proactive. From shame to ownership. I want a woman to walk in knowing her numbers, knowing her body, knowing she deserves actual answers and not just reassurance and a pat on the head. We've normalised women not knowing their own biology, and I find that genuinely unacceptable.

SheThePeople: We often discuss women's health socially but rarely economically. How do you see health autonomy affecting women's careers and financial independence?

Shaili Chopra: This is the conversation I am most impatient to have. Think about it. A woman who doesn't understand her hormonal health loses years of productivity to symptoms she was told were just stress or just ageing.

A woman who hits perimenopause at the peak of her career, with no support, no information, and no workplace accommodation, often quietly steps back. We have almost no data on how much women's health gaps are costing us economically because nobody thought to measure it.

Health autonomy is not a wellness trend. It is a productivity issue, a leadership pipeline issue, and a financial independence issue all in one. When a woman is well, she works better, earns more, stays longer, and invests more. That is not soft data. That's business. And anyone who is still filing women's health under HR perks rather than business strategy is leaving serious money on the table.

SheThePeople: When you think about your own journey as a founder, were there moments where health had to compete with ambition?

Shaili Chopra: Every single year of my thirties, if I'm being honest. I had two children, built two companies, and went through two marriages, and somewhere in there decided that sleep was something other people needed.

I wore exhaustion like it was a credential. A lot of women of my generation did. We thought the way to prove we belonged in the room was to need less, ask for less, feel less. And then your body sends you a memo. Mine sent me several. I ignored the first few, which I don't recommend.

What I've figured out, slowly and sometimes the hard way, is that I can't build something that outlasts me if I'm running on empty. I still don't have perfect balance. I'm not sure that's even a real thing. But I've stopped treating rest like a reward I haven't earned yet. That's probably the most radical shift I've made as a founder, honestly, more than any business decision.

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SheThePeople: Mistakes. Risks. Stubbornness. What role have each of these played in building SheThePeople and Gytree?

Shaili Chopra: Mistakes taught me everything I actually know. The wins I celebrated and moved on from. The failures I sat with. Some of my sharpest editorial instincts came from getting a story completely wrong once and never wanting to feel that way again. I'm a much better builder because of the things that didn't work than because of the things that did.

Risks are basically just decisions you make before you have enough information, which is every decision when you're building something new. I've learned to be comfortable in that gap, or at least comfortable enough to act anyway.

And stubbornness. I prefer the word conviction, but yes, fine. Every time someone told me there was no market for women's stories in regional languages, my conviction walked me right past them. Sometimes being the most annoyingly persistent person in the room is the only strategy you have. I've made peace with that.

SheThePeople: If you could speak to your younger self before launching SheThePeople, what perspective would you share?

Shaili Chopra: Stop trying to make it make sense to everyone else before it makes sense to you. I spent so much energy in the early days explaining myself. Justifying the pivot from journalism. Defending the focus on women. Convincing investors it wasn't a niche. All of that energy was honestly wasted because the people who needed to believe in it eventually did, and the people who didn't were never going to.

I'd also tell her that the things she's most embarrassed about, the resets, the marriages, the very public pivots, those are going to become the most powerful parts of her story. Don't iron them out. Don't sanitise them for a pitch deck. They are the whole point. And one more thing. Rest. Not as a reward. Not after the next milestone. Now. The work will still be there in the morning. It always is.