Impact the future

“As organisers, we were delighted by the level of engagement and enthusiasm from the attendees,” says Alina Gerlach, a board member of feMTEC and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Work and Organizational Psychology at D-MTEC. “Additionally, the insightful discussions that took place among the participants exceeded our expectations. The sense of community and support among everyone involved was truly inspiring and made the event a resounding success.”

“We chose the theme “Women shaping the next tech revolution” because of the unique opportunities for women we see to actively shape innovation in the growing tech sector, which is characterized by rapid innovations and developments,” say the feMTEC organisers.

Panel moderator Daniella Laureiro-Martinez (senior scientist in the Chair of Technology and Innovation Management at D-MTEC and Lead of the COLAB Group) noted that women have been a minority in the tech sector for a long time but that there is now an increase in the number of women working in the field. She was pleased by the diversity of the questions asked to the panel by the audience, “some about personal concerns, some about professional concerns, and some more philosophical about the impact of tech on society”.

The other panellists were D-MTEC alumna external page Kemeng Zhang, AI/ML Application Architect at Amazon Web Services; external page Diana Affi-Miks, Senior Technical Solutions Engineer at Google; external page Dr Gaëlle Andreatta, co-founder and CTO of the ETH start-up Apheros (and a student in the D-MTEC embaX programme); and external page Patricia Ferreiro, Data and AI Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft.

feMTEC is the gender equality and community-building association at D-MTEC, a collective of D-MTEC students and employees that puts on networking events and initiatives with a focus on gender equality and cross-cultural awareness. external page WiDS and external page Women Techmakers Zurich share with feMTEC the goal of fostering gender equality through presenting audiences with inspiring women as role models in various tech fields and positions.

The event not only showcased five inspiring women in tech, however. It also provided non-MTEC audience members, who made up about 50 percent of the audience of 45, with insight into the department. “Although (or one should say precisely because!) the panel was about women in tech,” notes Daniella Laureiro-Martinez, “a lot of the discussion was about the broader impact that tech has in the world. For those who are deeply embedded in the tech side of things, it was very enriching to see how in our department we develop a more rounded view of how tech affects society and the environment, not only here and now, but also in other places and with a longer-term view.”