The Inspiring Girls Foundation and the Fluttr online platform, winners of the fourth d-LAB challenge

• The two winners of the challenge devise projects to enhance the role of women in ICT
• MWCapital and Barcelona City Hall assist the performance of these pilot projects and their implementation in Barcelona

October 18, 2018

Mobile World Capital Barcelona and Barcelona City Hall have announced Inspiring Girls and Fluttr as winners of the fourth d-LAB challenge, the digital transformation programme that here has sought the best solutions and projects to reduce the gender gap in the ICT sector. This award has involved GSMA, the Digital Leadership Institute, and the European Center For Women and Technology as ambassadors. The awards ceremony took place today as part of the event ‘Open City: Biennial of Thought’, organised by Barcelona City Hall. Jordi Arrufí, Director of d-LAB at MWCapital, and Francesca Bria, Commissioner for Digital Technology and Innovation of Barcelona City Hall, awarded the prizes.

Prior to the awards ceremony there took place a round table entitled ‘Women in the tech industry: challenging stereotypes’, which involved some outstanding women figures in the struggle to reduce inequality between men and women. The debate featured the participation of Francesca Bria, Commissioner for Digital Technology and Innovation of Barcelona City Hall, Eva Fabri, Director of the European Center for Women and Technology; Cheryl Miller, Founding Director of Digital Leadership Institute, Founding Director and Therese Jamaa, General Manager GSMA, Mobile World Capital.

The winning projects will boost women’s status in the ICT sector

Both winners, along with MWCapital and the City Hall, will perform and implement their pilot projects in Barcelona. The first winner, Inspiring Girls, is, specifically, a project designed to boost the school-age girls’ self-esteem, professional ambition and career prospects. Driven by a Foundation that was established four years ago by Miriam González Durántez, this project has created a world campaign called Inspiring Girls Online that uses technology to connect girls from 10 to 15 years old with role models of women professional in all sectors and of all levels and ages. This connection takes place through an open digital platform that features a broad range of interviews with women who fulfil different roles, thus offering all girls with Internet access the chance to learn from them.

The second prize at this fourth edition went to the online advice platform Fluttr. Founded by Amleto Montinari and Alessandro Franzi, the platform offers a personnel recruitment system that uses Big Data to help companies to select the best candidate while eliminating gender discrimination. This project, which is now on the market and was a GSMA Women4Tech Hack_D_Gap Global Challenge finalist at the latest 4YFN, hopes to become the best platform for reducing the gender gap in the ICT sector and to boost women’s access to this area of the employment market. To do so, Fluttr proposes both mentoring sessions applied to recruitment processes and the creation of an online school with content and technological challenges designed to improve women’s skills.