In 2015 Andrea Lombard established the first tech club for women on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. FEMTech is open to women of all majors. After two years, the group now has a full series of programs including speaker events, web-development workshops, tutoring services and a robot building team. FEMTech now has more than 30 board members, hosts weekly speaker events and workshops, and is helping make critical STEM skills accessible to women at Berkeley.
Lombard, who graduated from Berkeley this year, stated that “it is amazing how many women in sociology, anthropology and political science wanted to know about computer science, but they were afraid of going into the computer science department. I thought, ‘If I’m going to build a club, I will bring other majors to hang out in that area of campus.’”
Lombard added, “FEMTech is the support system we created for women to say, ‘I want to do it, I’ve never done it before, but I’m going to do it now.’”
Whitney Hischier, faculty director of the Center for Executive Education at the Haas School of Business, notes that “when women don’t see other women in STEM fields, they assume that it would be difficult. FEMTech brings visibility to female leaders in STEM, who are really the key to offering both inspiration and networking opportunities for students.”