Why 180 people auditioned for 13 places. Inside TEDxTinHau Women’s tenth year

When Jen Flowers moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai, she assumed the city had no use for another women’s event. She had co-chaired TEDxShanghaiWomen, which started on a stage made from wooden boxes and ended up in a thousand-seat theatre on Nanjing Road. Hong Kong was “so international already,” she remembers thinking.

Then she looked at who the existing networks were for. “It was women in finance, women in tech, women in sport, women in law, women entrepreneurs,” she says. “It was not anything that brought everybody across.”

In November 2017, with co-founders Stefanie Meyers and Daniella Lopez, she launched TEDxTinHau Women with 300 people in a black-box theatre at Hong Kong’s PMQ retail and cultural complex. The name comes from the sea goddess whose temples are dotted across the coast.

On 2 October the event holds its tenth edition at the Xiqu Centre in West Kowloon, with 13 speakers, 11 talks and the theme “Uncharted”.

A committee of 70

Camille Or, the organisation’s chief operating officer and head of community, has been involved for eight of the ten editions. “It’s almost like a full-time job in itself being a volunteer,” she says.

The committee is around 70 people, split into teams for leadership, marcomms, curation, partnerships and creative experience. They meet fortnightly from February and weekly as October approaches. 

Maria Blanca, this year’s co-chair alongside Flowers and the head of charities, works full-time at 100 Women in Finance. Her colleagues at TedxTinHau Women, she says, are “genuinely some of the busiest people in the room”. She has stayed because of them. “I see this team as family.”

Or says the way the group handles being short-handed is what has kept it going. People say when they cannot deliver, and someone else picks it up. “No one is left to carry something entirely on their own.”

The pandemic tested that. Some events went ahead with Xs taped onto theatre seats. But with committee members struggling to stay in touch on Zoom, the team participated in “kindness walks” with Impact HK, a charity working with the homeless – a short meeting, then handing out food, hygiene products and bottled water together to street sleepers. “The fact that we’re still here, standing strong with over 1,200 people involved, is a testament to what’s been built,” Or says.

Three charities a year

Flowers describes TEDxTinHau Women as “community led” rather than “curation led”. The clearest sign of that is the fair after the talks, and the charities involved.

Each year three charities join as partners. After ten editions the total stands at 26, and Blanca has pushed them beyond the usual booth. “We never wanted people to just walk past a table and pick up a flyer,” she says. “You can find that at any expo.”

In early September, one of this year’s partners – which provides free cancer screenings – opened for two days to the staff and beneficiaries of all 23 previous charity partners. “Seeing how many beneficiaries were able to get checked was incredibly powerful,” Blanca says.

Blanca calls it a ripple effect. “Something always seems to happen after a speaker is on stage,” she says. A speaker on femtech built a business from the people who approached her afterwards. A start-up exhibiting at the fair collected enough feedback from attendees to build an app. 

Flowers would like to measure all of this. “One of my favourite things would be to actually track all of that data and be able to do a report,” she says. For now the evidence is word of mouth, and the LinkedIn posts from attendees who call it the one event of the year they use to refocus.

What makes a talk stick

Or is wary of the word storytelling. “It’s a pretty overused word in the industry,” she says. “What actually moves people is specificity.”

Each speaker works with professional coaches and a “speaker buddy” to shape the talk around one takeaway. Or still remembers a doctor who spoke years ago about sarcopenia – women lose around 1 per cent of their muscle mass a year as they age – and about watching her own mother grow weaker.

Flowers has a habit of asking people for their favourite talk after each event. “If I ask eight people, I’ll get six different answers.”

The range of subjects has grown as the audience has shown it is ready. Talks have covered fertility, loss and, last year, suicide prevention. A talk on the status of refugees in Hong Kong received a standing ovation, which Blanca says she had not seen at the event before. “That’s when you know: this is what people want and need to hear.”

A full day, and five quests

Funding has been steady, Flowers says. She prefers many partners at modest levels to a few large ones – “then they invite more and bring their staff”. Some international corporates have cut diversity budgets in recent years, and the team has had to find new partners.

Previous years had six to nine speakers; 2026 has 13, which Flowers admits has added “a whole new layer of complexity”, from speaker gifts to hair and make-up. “That satisfaction when we pull it off is so much better.”

The format has changed too. For the first time the event runs a full day, opening with five small-group “quests” – among them a cooking class on nutrition for women’s bodies and a public-speaking workshop – with lunch included. As far as the team knows, no other TEDx in Asia has run anything similar. The main stage adds a duo and a cluster of short talks on one theme.

Some 180 people applied to speak. Among those chosen are Angela Wong and William Lo, the couple behind a basketball programme for girls in Hong Kong, and Jane Houng, whose daughter was murdered while working abroad and who went on to found Becky’s Button, a charity that distributes personal safety alarms.

“Extremely traumatic, though not all our talks are,” Or says of Houng’s story. The test she applies to every talk is whether it changes what the audience does afterwards. “Does it change how you think about parenting, about protecting women, about giving girls with potential the opportunity they haven’t had?”

For Blanca, the theme is also about the moment. “We’re living through a period with a lot of division, hate and rapid change in the world,” she says. “So the theme is really about how we stay relevant, how we keep responding to what the world needs, and how we keep bringing people back to a sense of connection.”

Asked about the next ten years, Flowers is practical. She would like more views on YouTube – a couple of speakers have passed half a million, and “anything over 100,000 is great”.

Or answers differently. “I hope that in ten years, whoever’s asked this question doesn’t need to remember any of our names,” she says, “but does remember what our real mission was.”

TEDxTinHau Women 2026: Uncharted takes place on Friday 2 October at the Xiqu Centre, West Kowloon Cultural District. Tickets via Cityline; details at tedxtinhauwomen.com.

TEDxTinHauWomen 2026 at a glance

What: TEDxTinHau Women 2026 – Uncharted, the tenth edition of Hong Kong’s longest-standing TEDx event dedicated to women
When: Friday 2 October 2026, 9 am-6 pm
Where: Xiqu Centre, 88 Austin Road, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong
Programme: 13 speakers, 11 talks, five morning “quests”, community fair
Organisers: volunteer committee of around 70, co-chaired by Jen Flowers and Maria Blanca
Tickets: shows.cityline.com