The initiative, which aims to promote scientific and technological vocations among girls, has been recognized with the Digital Skills Awards Spain 2024 in the category 'Digital skills for women and girls'
The program 'We are Young Women Researchers', which promotes the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) with the aim of boosting scientific and technological vocations especially among girls, has been awarded with the Digital Skills Awards Spain 2024 in the category 'Digital skills for women and girls'. The award, given by AMETIC, the association that represents the digital industry sector in Spain, was collected by the BSC's Head of Communications, Núria Noriega.
The aim of the Digital Skills Awards is to recognize the best experiences in the field of the development of enabling talent in digital skills for society, professionals, education, women and girls, in inclusion and vocational training. According to AMETIC, these projects help to reduce the digital breach and to have more ICT professionals in Spain, making us more prepared in an increasingly digitized society.
'We are Young Women researchers' is a BSC program whose purpose is to combat the gender gap among the youngest, collaborating in the creation of female role models related to STEM subjects and aimed at capturing the attention of primary school girls-at a time when girls begin to question their role in these subjects. Since its inception in 2019, around 34,000 female and male students have gone through this program, initially implemented with schools in and around the city of Barcelona.
In these school visits to BSC, in addition to getting to know the MareNostrum supercomputer, students learn, through various activities, what it means to program and give instructions to a computer, how an electrical circuit works, how to analyze the data obtained from a simulation of the seabed and test the advantages of parallel computing, which is the method used by supercomputers to obtain results faster and more efficiently.
In 2022 'We are Young Women researchers' began its implementation in different autonomous communities, through the centers of the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES), with the aim of reaching the maximum number of students and reproduce the success of the initiative throughout the Spanish geography. That same year, the project was awarded the National Research Award for Scientific Communication by the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació (FCRI).