Girls’ Day, organised by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, is a day when young girls are given the opportunity to try out and look at a job, with the aim of breaking down societal stereotypes regarding gender in the workplace. In 2022, Olaf Scholz and the D21 initiative inaugurated the project on 28 April, and to mark the occasion, we welcomed an eleven-year-old girl to our office.
About Girl’s Day
Girl’s Day is a nationwide project that aims to help young girls decide what they want to study. On this annual project day, schoolgirls have the opportunity to visit companies that specialise in sectors that are dominated by men and therefore have a low proportion of female employees. Girls must be in the fifth year of school to take part, and are given a day off to use the time to explore studies or careers in areas such as crafts, science, technology or IT.
Girl’s Day is the world’s largest and most popular careers project, with more than 2 million schoolgirls taking part since its inception, spreading the important message that girls can work in any profession they choose.
For more information: https://www.girls-day.de/
Project of the Day
Arriving at 08:45 in the morning, the eleven-year-old girl who visited us was taken with our picture of the “office cat” – a cat drawn on the whiteboard in the meeting room.
The pupil’s task for the day was to build a computer from its parts, with the aim of being able to see a video of a cat. One of our engineers helped her with the project and answered her questions throughout.
She said that the majority of fifth graders take part in Girl’s Day and that she enjoyed trying something different from her daily routine, which usually consists of going to school, meeting friends and playing football.
She proved to be very committed to the process, despite not having much background knowledge of the technology she was dealing with.
In the afternoon she had a lunch break with the team and after that, she successfully completed her task and spent the last few minutes of her stay in our office watching videos of cats on the rebuilt machine. We were very impressed with how well she did considering she had never worked with this type of technology before, but she did say that she found it interesting to see how a computer works and looks from the ‘inside’.
All in all, participating in Girl’s Day was very important for boTec, especially as the technology sector is mainly dominated by men.
Seeing the enthusiasm of a young girl was a good and important experience for both us and our guests. We look forward to welcoming more students in the years to come.
