This Young, Female CEO, a Veteran of Women’s Month Features, Advocates For the Real Meaning of Women’s Month

“I’m triggered. I’m honestly triggered.”

Ryna Brito-Garcia, CEO of local domestic boutique airline Sunlight Air, is smiling and has kept her generally pleasant demeanor, but you can feel the exasperation and irritation radiating from her as she tackles an issue that we’ve unearthed.

It is an Allure Philippines Women’s Day feature shoot—of which Brito-Garcia is something of a veteran—and we’ve done away with the niceties and standard questions about running an airline, and Brito-Garcia is telling us what she really thinks—that in media features done on her, she’s usually asked questions that she doesn’t think would be asked of a male CEO.

“Just the mere question of ‘how do you run the airline as a female CEO?’ Would you say, ‘how do you run an airline as a male CEO?’” She laughs, but you can tell that her frustration is real. “I’m triggered.”

A ticket to the top

Gail Geriane

If you search online and type in the words Ryna Brito-Garcia or Sunlight Air, you will, indeed, pull up a great many features on Brito-Garcia—most focusing on her being the first female CEO of a local airline, and an exceptionally young one at that.

These are facts, and, truth be told, are also part and parcel of why Allure Philippines wanted her in our Women’s Month lineup. But, as it turns out, Brito-Garcia has more to say than merely narrate the story of how she became a CEO, and talk about the difficulties of running a company as a young, female leader. She, in fact, is more than a little self-aware of how she has been framed, and has a seemingly inherent tendency to question the status quo.

The decision to have her run Sunlight Air, she tells us, had never really been part of a carefully constructed plan. An offshoot of her family’s Sunlight Hotels & Resorts Group in Palawan, the airline needed someone to set it up around seven years ago, about the same time Brito-Garcia returned home from abroad.

“It wasn’t exactly planned,” Brito-Garcia shares, “When I came home, I was shuffling between the various industries in the corporation.” She was heading the marketing sales operations of Sunlight Hotels and Resorts Group when the need arose for someone to set up the airline from the ground up, and Brito-Garcia, then only in her mid-twenties, turned out to be that person. For the next year, she, together with a corporate lawyer, worked on compliances and paperwork, liaising with government agencies, spending her lunch break learning about the airline industry and reading manuals provided by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, until Sunlight Air finally received its license to operate.

Gail Geriane

And since she was already knee-deep in the work, she was then assigned to lead the team, to hire employees and pilots, to create plans and strategies, and expand the groundwork that she had already laid. “It just kind of happened, and eventually, I was just labeled ‘CEO,’” she shares. In other words, it was a matter of getting the work done first, earning the title, before she could lay claim to it.

When you grow up in a business-oriented family, and witness the ins and outs early on, it’s obviously easy to flow right into things and find your footing within already-existing structures. Still, other scions prefer to choose different paths. Brito-Garcia, however, had always planned to join the family business. “Business has always been kind of innate in me. Even as a kid, I was selling things to my classmates. So, entrepreneurship and business are two things that I’ve always felt [were] in me since I was a kid.”

Hence, after completing her studies in business management at the SP Jain School of Global Management, which has campuses around the world, Brito-Garcia joined the family fold, reporting “to our chairman, who is my dad,” she explains.

Gail Geriane

Turbulence, expected

But, as easy as it is to be an outsider looking in, envisioning a cushy posting and easy work dynamics, Brito-Garcia hasn’t been spared her own challenges. Setting up an airline, for one, seems to be its own beast. Furthermore, much has been said about Brito-Garcia, who is turning 32 this year, being a young, female leader—and not always in the favorable sense. Maybe her praises are sung in a Women’s Month feature, but it’s a different story in the daily grind.

“Within the team, I can feel that I’ve already earned the respect,” she says, but “when it’s the outsiders looking in, and they just see me as this young girl running the show?” Nowadays, Brito-Garcia has learned to be strategic and use things to her advantage. But that wasn’t always the case.

“Before, when I was starting, say five, six years ago, and they’d be like, ‘oh, you’re so young,’ I would just get shy and be quiet. But now that I’m older and I’ve gotten used to the industry, with these comments, I just say, ‘Oh, thank you. You look young too.’ And that’s it.”

In business and the corporate world—and even beyond—comments on age or gender aren’t always neutral—they can be underhanded, and used a way to undermine others. Brito-Garcia obviously knows this, but has learned to let things go. “I have learned to embrace my womanhood and my age, to the advantage of the business,” she says. “I do not let comments like that affect the way Sunlight Air is run.”

In fact, she points out, as a woman—a young woman—there are things she brings to the table that others cannot. “My values and characteristics that are innately in me as a woman, such as being more empathetic, being able to handle stressful situations a little better—those are things that equip me day-to-day, especially in such a volatile industry,” Brito-Garcia points out.

For her, even the facts that she is young and did not start her career inside the airline industry offer some advantages. “A lot of people think that me not coming from the airline industry might be a weakness,” she shares. “But I think that me alongside my team, who are very experienced in the airline industry, is a very strategic group of people who can solve things as quickly as possible. I’m that lens that’s looking in. Because of that, we’re able to think of solutions that maybe not all businesses can figure out as quickly as we can.”

A perfect landing for Women’s Month

Gail Geriane

A Woman’s Month feature, then, for Brito-Garcia, means several things.

For one, it’s a chance to tell her story, and, in a reflection of her rather strategic business nature, tell Sunlight Air’s story as well, perhaps bringing more attention to the business.

In another vein, she acknowledges its power—to unite, to inspire, and to push for change, to “draw attention for the greater good of women in the future,” she says. And although she has tired of the line of questioning usually directed to her, and perhaps detects traces of prejudice and bias in them, “I still like the fact that me being a woman sitting as a CEO in this industry, one that’s mostly men, is able to inspire a lot of young girls out there—girls who want to become pilots or mechanics, or even want to become executives of an airline also.” It’s the same thing for stories from other industries, she says, “that highlighting women CEOs inspires a lot of young girls to aspire for such positions also.”

But if Brito-Garcia had her own way, Women’s Month would be a chance to take a long, hard look at society—a time to “look at the policies that countries have that might be unequal to women. There are still a lot, and there’s still a lot out there that we can do to make it equal for both men and women.”

And although she recognizes the value in telling her own story, she would also love to hear stories of other women. “There are lots of women out there that are worth highlighting, not just women in high positions or those with glamorous jobs,” she says, “but, say, a single mom who’s maybe a cleaner, or even someone who’s just striving to survive on the day-to-day.”

Ryna Brito-Garcia has told her own story many times. For her, Women’s Month belongs to women everywhere, and through our collective voices, we should all advocate for lasting change.

Photography by Gail Geriane, assisted by Jotham Meregildo. Makeup and hair by Aica Latay, assisted by RJ Coste. Styling by Jia Torrato and Nina Cuyana of Qurator. Art direction by Nicole Almero, assisted by Mikiyo Ricamora. Beauty direction by Mikiyo Ricamora.

On Ryna: Ruohan top. Zara Skirt.