Hong Kong’s two-time Olympic silver medallist Siobhán Haughey cuts a powerful figure in the pool, but the 25-year-old tells Tatler she’s more of an introvert in her everyday life. She also shared the best advice she’s received, why more girls should play sports and how she handles the social media attention that comes with being a world-class athlete.

“I was lucky that I grew up in an environment where no one ever told me, ‘you can’t do this because you’re a girl’ or ‘you can only do this because you’re a girl’”, Haughey says. “I never thought that I was limited in my ability to do anything.”

Read Siobhán Haughey’s full interview here.

During the pandemic, and after surviving two bouts of cancer, fashion designer Vivian Luk found herself at home with her daughters a lot more, and started to see dresses she had designed before the pandemic from a new angle: "If my dresses were a girl, what would each of them look like?" She also asked herself what superpower they might have? 

Her debut children’s book, Honeycomb & Her Superpower Friends, is an ode to girl empowerment, and to the ordinary superpowers she wanted to impress upon her daughters: creativity, passion, kindness, courage, gratitude, curiosity and persistence. 

Read Vivian Luk’s full interview here.

“The tattooing process is almost like a ritual where I often see myself as a healer with a mission to help an individual feel alive again”, says tattoo artist Sweney Chan. “From listening to my client's stories to drawing the right design on the skin, every step is replete with intimacy.”

Still considered taboo by many, tattoos have become a powerful tool for women to subvert normative ideals of beauty in Asia. With her delicate style, Chan has mastered the art of inscribing intimate stories of growth onto her clients’ skin. 

Read Sweney Chan’s full interview here. 

With representation increased in her newsroom, “I feel a lot more comfortable today when I look around the editorial table than I was maybe ten years ago”, says Ellana Lee, CNN's senior VP and managing editor for Asia Pacific. 

With such a powerful network that has a global reach, it was crucial to Lee that CNN is employing journalists from all walks of life to bring their varied life experiences to the table in order to contextualise news and identify underreported angles. From the only Asian woman in the newsroom to now leading teams, Lee continues to make the diversification of newsrooms and news coverage one of her main missions. 

Read Ellana Lee’s full interview here. 

From encouraging domestic workers to take the plunge to teaching low income and special needs children basic swimming skills, Splash Foundation recently expanded its programmes from Hong Kong to Singapore, and has international ambitions to make swimming accessible to all.

“We  realised that teaching someone the basics of swimming is not that hard”, says Libby Alexander, Co-founder of Splash, who found herself being inspired by “the empowerment and watching the women change within that 12-week period” and talked to Tatler about how the attitude, mindset and what these helpers believed was possible transformed during the course of the programme, and also about the social connections they built.

Read Libby Alexander’s full interview here.

In 2022, regulatory reforms from the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong opened up at least 1,350 board appointments for women, and experienced Independent Non-Executive Director (INED) Lily Cheng talked to us about this shift, the role of an INED and how to become a good one.

“I do see a slow trend towards an increasing number of women on boards. So, it’s heading in the right direction, but not quite at the pace that we’d all like to see” says Cheng, who is one of Hong Kong’s first INEDs. 

Since joining her first board, Cheng has often been among only two female INEDs in the room at board meetings, and sometimes she was the only one. This is why she remains devoted to guiding other women in this world that much more readily represents men.

Read Lily Cheng’s full interview here. 

In 2017, Alicia Lui launched Women In Sport Empowered (WISE)  Hong Kong to empower women and girls, particularly those from underserved communities, through sport and physical activity. WISE also works towards achieving greater gender equality in the sports industry.

“When the school asked me to try out for track and field, my parents thought I’d be too muscular and my thighs would be too manly”, Lui recalls. “And when I wanted to try rugby they said it was too violent and rough and I would hurt myself.” Luckily, there was no stopping Lui.

Read Alicia Lui’s full interview here.

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