The goal was clear: to enhance awareness, encourage early detection and promote proactive health measures among women.
On March 22, Hong Kong’s Phenomenally Pink and Joint Dynamics came together to spotlight women's health for International Women's Month. The goal was clear: to enhance awareness, encourage early detection and promote proactive health measures among women.
With this, TMS got up close with some of the event organizers and partners on why it’s important for them to take part in the event to raise awareness around women’s health.
“It’s our first women’s health afternoon, and we want to get more voices to the table and get more champions along to talk about this important topic of women’s health across three different sectors that we predominantly activate within,” explained Sonia Vashi Chandiramani, the co-founder of Phenomenally Pink and Onside Sports Group. “Instead of doing typical topics that are over-talked about, and we decided to do what’s true to us, so women’s health and not just breast health.”
Why is it important for your organization to support and spotlight women’s health?
Ernst & Young
“It’s important for our people and for our client that we progress gender equity and we do this by focusing on women’s health so that everybody can thrive in the workplace, and feel a sense of belonging and we can have better business results. We know that over 70% of C-suite women played sports growing up so it’s really important for us to work with community partners like Phenomenally Pink to encourage more women and girls to get into and stay in sports.”
– Kate Wood, Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness Leader at Ernst & Young for Asia Pacific
“At EY, we do a lot of events to support women, but I think it’s so important to support women in being active. I personally play field hockey and I love the community that it brings women together, and you can share your issues and support each other through whatever's going on. It’s very important that we support today.”
– Sophie Lindsay, partner at Ernst & Young
Splash Foundation
“So most of our beneficiaries from Splash Foundation are women, and we actually have one of our swimmers fighting with breast cancer right now. So I think it’s very important to raise awareness of cell checkups or medical checkups regularly. And apparently, there’s a lot of benefits women can bring to us, but it is physical activities and how our body will actually affect how we perform in the water as well.”
– Stephanie Ching, program officer at Splash
Joint Dynamics
“We’ve seen quite a large population that’s been underserved for a long period of time. Phenomenally Pink have been fantastic cultural ambassadors and with our women’s team and the Evolve team, it was a perfect synergy to get involved and help support them and the local community.”
– David Jacquier, co-owner of Joint Dynamics
“I manage the clinical team of Joint Dynamics Evolve and we’re Hong Kong’s first multi-disciplinary clinic specializing in supporting women’s physical and emotional needs throughout their entire life span. So naturally a company like Phenomenally Pink is very much in our wavelength. I love everything that they do, what the team does in empowering women to get on top of being diagnosed and supporting them through the diagnoses of breast cancer, or also just raising awareness of getting checked regularly. I think everyone knows someone in our life or a friend or just one degree apart from someone who has been touched by breast cancer in some way. And the flow and effect of being affected by this is very vast, so we’re really passionate about supporting Phenomenally Pink and growing their community of supporters and getting that word out there.”
– Emily Huetone Wong, the Clinical Manager of Women's Health & Physiotherapist at Joint Dynamics
Body Banter
“I’m passionate about women’s health and promoting mental health because of my own experiences and I think it’s informed a lot of the work I do, struggled with an eating disorder in my teens, support a lot of young people through body image and eating-related struggles in my work today.
With my charity Body Banter, I run to just start conversations with young people and help them see that these topics don’t have to be taboo or scary even though society always promotes it as such, even just talking about periods for example, you mention it and people are already ‘ugh’ let’s not talk about that which is why I’m so happy to see events like this where I walked in saw bags with boobs on them and it was so refreshing.
You don’t often get that space. I’m hoping that through events like these and having more persistent and thoughtful conversations about topics that are often seen as taboo, you can start to normalize them. Even when it’s scary people know that they’re in a good community and supported by a lot of people as they go through these scary conversations.”
– Stephanie Ng, founder of Body Banter and author of “Big Bites Break Boundaries”
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