Building a better future for all: Reflections on five years of TECwomen.
We spend a lot of time asking girls what they would build to make the world a better place. While I was working for a local tech company, I saw the lack of women applying for jobs and the lack of any STEM programmes aimed at girls in Cornwall. So I began building something myself.
Five years ago, with my baby daughter in tow and determined that her world should look different to mine, I reached out to a group of women who would help me launch the first TECwomen Connect event, and kicked off our first TECgirls workshops in communities across Cornwall. In those first workshops we connected with families and showed young girls that tech, engineering, and creative making were fun. We gave girls a space to explore and learn surrounded by other “techie” girls. And we saw first hand what a huge impact we could make through our work.
Over the years, we learned and launched pilot after pilot. We created a new way of running STEM clubs for rural primary schools, supporting teachers, providing much needed practical hands on learning and introducing girls to role models doing exciting jobs on their doorsteps. Working with industry, we developed Challenge Days that gave secondary school girls a chance to tackle real world problems in a team. Supporting schools, we delivered whole year groups workshops on inclusive innovation, data science, and AI.
We wanted to reach more families, so we created a festival that now reaches over 1,500 people a year. And most recently we’ve created a pathway for young women aged 8 - 25 that helps us connect everything we do to real, local careers.
For women, we took our first post Covid event and turned it into a series of events. We decided to take this further and launched UPLIFT Learning as a way to help hundreds of women learn new skills and pivot into new roles. We now reach over 100 women in Cornwall every year.
Over five years we have reached thousands of girls and women in Cornwall. We’ve won awards, spoken on the national stage, built relationships with hundreds of local partners, and what was a ripple is now an unstoppable wave. I am confident that the girls and women we’ve been working with will go on to do amazing things. And I’m so grateful to the volunteers, funders, team members, champions and allies that have got us here. Here’s to the next five years!
Caitlin Gould, Founder & CEO
September 2026
Download The Wave, our five year impact report:
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