Kathy Zhou never considered herself the type of woman who would enter a beauty pageant. But this May, the Pinterest engineer found herself among a cluster of young professionals in a San Francisco coworking space, ready to be converted to the gospel of pageantry.

They had gathered for an Imagine Talks forum, one of the TED-style leadership panels organized by the Miss Asian Global and Miss Asian America pageant—a competition that hopes to remake the rules of pageantry into a culturally rewarding, even feminist, event.

By offering workshops on subjects like women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship, MAG, as the pageant is often called, aims to transform the beauty pageant into a useful platform for its participants; by including only Asian women, the organizers say, it’s helping contestants think about their ethnicity as something to be celebrated. This talk, for instance, was themed around the subject “girl boss” and included an all-Asian panel of women: a sex-toy mogul, a skin-care specialist, a community activist, a marketer, and two former beauty queens.

“When in doubt, think like a mediocre white man,” the sex-toy mogul, Ti Chang, encouraged the audience. Laughs erupted when Nisha Baxi, a director of marketing at Salesforce, mimicked her father’s Indian accent to note his wisdom: “Fake it till you make it, beta.” Wearing bright, Barbie-doll-pink heels, Crystal Lee—a Stanford graduate, cofounder of a Dropbox-like online vault, and the first runner-up to Miss America 2014—spoke of how her male colleagues told her to omit her pageant experience from LinkedIn. “It doesn’t look good,” she recalled them saying.

The directors of MAG, however, hope their pageant can serve as a résumé builder. Held in the Bay Area for the last 33 years, MAG is structured like an ordinary beauty pageant—contestants compete on an optional talent, cultural attire, evening gowns, a Q&A round called “Platform and Poise,” and a swimsuit division bearing the moniker “Form and Fitness.” Organizers and participants argue that MAG disrupts the sexy standard of Miss USA or Miss Universe, combining instead the wholesome goodness of Miss America with professional achievement, which organizers say is important for them to be taken seriously.

But, yes, there’s still a swimsuit competition. And looks matter. The organizers screen head shots and body shots along with résumés, platform statements, and an optional video showcasing talent, to see who can “deliver ROI,” as Francis Kong, one of the pageant’s advisers, told me, adding that MAG girls are the “prettiest smart girls,” or the “smartest pretty girls.” In the weeks leading up to the pageant, volunteers train the "delegates," MAG’s preferred term for contestants, in the right and wrong ways to approach investors who sponsor their participation. This system is designed to reinforce contestants’ networking skills and, above all, field “good” representatives—women who can stand for themselves as well as for an entire continent. That’s why, instead of calling itself a beauty pageant, MAG prefers the term "cultural pageant."

Some of the women found wearing a swimsuit in front of hundreds of people, including their families, empowering. Jessica Chou In the cultural-attire event, participants donned outfits that celebrated their ethnicity, often with a modern flair. Jessica Chou

Crowning women with visibility and responsibility, MAG organizers hope to prepare its entrants to navigate the challenges of their professional lives. Asians and Asian-Americans are ubiquitous within tech companies, their food is appreciated by white CEOs, their homelands replicated by ethnoburbs like South San Francisco, Fremont, and Daly City. And yet their career trajectory is limited. According to a 2017 report, Asians are the least likely racial group to be promoted for leadership and management positions in Silicon Valley, a phenomenon nicknamed the “bamboo ceiling.” The report also found that race, more than gender, remained a more significant factor when it came to career advancement. By providing a place where women are celebrated for the things that might be a hindrance in Silicon Valley—their femaleness, their Asianness, and yes, maybe also their beauty—MAG organizers believe they are cultivating a cohort that is empowered to break into leadership.