We hope you took some time to relax and rejuvenate as well as reflect on what you want to bring into 2024. At TWF, we are choosing to greet the new year with hope.

Hope invites us to envision a truly equitable society. But it is a perspective that requires hard work and vigilance. It is not easy to maintain a positive outlook when the news is grim. Globally, we are facing a number of crises that adversely impact women and girls: increased gender-based violence, food insecurity, and widening labour, wage and education gaps. In Hong Kong, we also face our own challenges: pervasive sexual violence, low female workforce participation rate, increased vulnerabilities for marginalised groups, gender biases and discrimination, to name a few.

In the face of so many challenges, we remain hopeful – that with community-wide collaboration and persistence, gender equality is possible. This is why, as we enter into our 20th anniversary year, we are giving you four of our commitments on making meaningful progress towards eradicating gender inequality in Hong Kong:

• Engendering future-forward leadership and tech skills: Inspiring underprivileged girls to pursue STEM-related subjects and careers via our Girls Go Tech Programme remains a key focus. We are excited to be expanding our efforts to address the gender gap in emerging and existing technologies through spearheading a dialogue series to encourage women to get involved in and lead AI, WEB 3 and Tokenisation initiatives. And within our Marginalised Women Series, we are incorporating elements of digital tools and support to improve participants’ mental well-being.
• Meeting people where they are: We don’t expect all individuals or organisations to fully understand how gender equality benefits everyone. This is why we focus on creating judgement-free spaces to explore the root causes of gender inequality and our own roles in perpetuating or halting it, and employ a graduated learning approach in our programmes. Our Young Allies, Male Allies and Mentoring Programme participants join a year-long journey, to equip them with knowledge and skills to take back into their communities or organisations.
• Building sustainable change: We concentrate on transforming structures and norms for long-term, sustainable change. This is why we are aiming for 50% women on boards and are expanding our Women to Watch Platform to drive efforts to do just that—because having equal representation at the highest levels of business raises awareness of the need for gender equality in other areas of society, with a positive impact on practices and policies. Among the next generation, we are continuing to address the learning support gap for local, underprivileged students to learn English through tutoring support from corporate volunteers.
• Challenging the status quo: The barriers to achieving gender equality are numerous and complex, and require the input, action and collaboration of every sector. This is why we are organising our second Gender Equality Summit in the autumn, bringing together people from all genders and all sectors to engage in thought-provoking dialogue and action-planning for change.

With these commitments, and with the incredible support and collaboration from our participants, alumni, partners, donors, supporters and other stakeholders, we are confident that together we can collectively make impact.

Let 2024 be a year of actionable hope and change.

Get in touch at Fiona.Nott@twfhk.org.