We hope you enjoyed the holidays with family and friends both near and far, and found space to re-energise and re-focus for the year ahead.

Last year, Hong Kong made progress towards gender equality through adopting several key reforms in a number of TWF’s advocacy areas including safeguards for breastfeeding mothers, protections from image-based abuse, and an end to single gender boards on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. While we celebrate these bright spots, we acknowledge there are still numerous complex and troubling issues facing women and girls in all domains. This past period under the pandemic has brought much needed visibility to existing inequalities and hidden issues that women and girls have been grappling with for decades: disproportionate caregiving responsibilities, mental health, violence and biases.

To address these issues in the year ahead, TWF has opted for two words of intention rather than resolutions to underscore how we plan to approach our work. Our first intention is to have courage – to have uncomfortable conversations, to listen and learn from diverse perspectives, to take bold, new action to close the gender equality gap, and to critically examine our own work and refine and evolve it as needed. Our second intention is kindness. Kindness is often underrated, particularly as a defining characteristic of an organisation. But consistently operating from a place of kindness is the foundation upon which connection, community and change happen.

Under this framework of courage and kindness, TWF will be focusing on the following areas:

• Continuing to advocate for a suite of reforms to improve the lives of women and girls including greater protections and preventative measures around all forms of sexual and domestic violence, stronger protections for vulnerable groups of women and girls, and increased support for women in poverty, among many others.
• Equipping underprivileged girls with the skills they need to thrive in the future through our STEM-focused Girls Go Tech and Digital Literacy Programmes as well as our #TEENForGood Initiative to support the learning needs of unprivileged students at risk of falling behind academically due to the pandemic.
• Connecting the dots between businesses, institutions, schools, NGOs, families and individuals for greater impact and long-term change towards a gender equal city.
• Engaging the current and next generation of male leaders as roles models and champions of gender equality through our Male Allies Initiative and upcoming Young Allies Initiative, drawing on findings from TWF’s masculinities research.
• Addressing barriers to women entering and advancing in the workplace through our Mentoring Programme for Women Leaders, Reverse Mentoring Initiative, Boardroom Series for Women Leaders, 30% Club Hong Kong, with a particular focus on increasing the number of women on boards.

This is an ambitious agenda. But at TWF we are confident that with the engagement and support from our strong network of partners, donors, volunteers, supporters and other stakeholders, we can grow our impact - together - and build a more equitable city for all.

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