The Future is Female

The city’s first Women’s Festival offers a packed schedule of talks, wellness seminars and even a bondage workshop. Marianna Cerini talks to the women behind it

- Marianna Cerini

Feminism is going through a critical cultural moment. Whether it’s to address gender equality, the wage gap or reproductive rights, women around the world are creating alternative movements and spaces away from mainstream constraints and increasingly raising their voices.

Hong Kong is no exception. It counts a strong, outspoken community of women and men advocating for parity, though it does lag in some areas. Studies by resources consultancy Willis Towers Watson and the non-profit organisation Community Business show Hong Kong women earn an average of 22 per cent less than men, a gap wider than in Singapore, the US, Britain and Australia, and occupy only 13.8 per cent of seats on the boards of Hang Seng Index companies.

So there are plenty of issues to be addressed this month at Hong Kong’s first Women’s Festival, which runs from September 1 to 9 at the Eaton hotel in Jordan.

The festival, and the Eaton, are the latest ventures from Langham hotel scion Katherine Lo, whose new global brand, Eaton Workshops, merges hospitality and progressive social change. “Gender issues have always been really important to me,” she says on the phone from Washington DC, her second home after Hong Kong. “Hosting the first Women’s Festival at Eaton is something I hope will make a big difference in the city.”