A huge thank you to the HK Computer Society Face Club for selecting TWF's Girls Go Tech Programme as the beneficiary for their charity walk on Sunday!
Our heartfelt gratitude goes to Charles Mok - the LegCo member for the IT sector, Michael Leung - President of the HK Computer Society, Cally Chan - Chairlady of HKCS FACE Club, Candy Liu - Chairperson of HKCS FACE Club Charity Walk and the other 400 walkers who joined us at Cyberport on Sunday morning. Thank you also to the many event sponsors including Accenture, BEA, BT, Cisco, CITIC, CLP, Elastic, FDM, Fortinet, HP, Hutchison Telecom, Gigamon Microsoft, PCCW, PwC, Rotary Club, SevOne and Women’s Exchange @ HKEX. The funds raised from Sunday's walk will allow us to continue to run the Programme next year. Our target is to reach over 400 girls at school in some of HK's poorest districts. If you weren't able to make the walk but would like to support the Programme, please contact Sarah at Sarah.AbbottLadner@twfhk.org.
Turning now to Dove's latest campaign which centres around the launch of bottles designed to look like six different body types, from thin to curvy. Social media is tearing the campaign apart for over-simplifying the female physique and promoting self-consciousness instead of body-positivity.
According to Dove: “Dove celebrates real women of all ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities in our campaigns. We use real women in all our campaigns because they represent the real beauty diversity in society. We wanted to take this a step further into the products themselves and have a bit of fun with them. The custom bottles of different shapes and sizes reflect the beauty in diversity through visual representation and are designed to spark a lively debate and discussion about what real beauty means...We take women’s beauty confidence very seriously and through the Dove Self-Esteem Project, we have reached more than 20 million young people with body confidence education and we aim to reach 20 million more by 2020.”
Critics, however, have called the campaign a "cringe-worthy advertising gaffe" which "oversimplifies the complicated issue of how society views women's bodies". As always, we would love to hear your thoughts. Please email me at su-mei.thompson@twfhk.org.