On International Women’s Day in Engineering, academics and professionals from the Stem Network and engineering careers at the University of Los Lagos celebrated on June 23, in the company of prominent local students and engineers.

It was a day of conversation that reviewed the main university projects that promote the insertion of more women into engineering careers. “Our goal is to attract more girls and adolescents to science, technology and mathematics and to that end, we have developed a permanent working relationship with the Girls and Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna high schools in Puerto Montt,” commented Francisca Viveros, coordinator of the RED project. STEM that brings together the universities of the southern austral macrozone, Aysén, Magallanes, Los Lagos and de la Frontera.

In this context, the team of researchers led by academic Mirna Brauning, presented the results of the Territorial Research Networks (RTI) research project: “Reducing gender gaps in the salmon industry: pilot of a gender policy in Salmones company Austral”, which seeks to generate a gender policy proposal and prioritize areas of intervention, in the Salmones Austral company.

Likewise, an open dialogue was generated to analyze the projection, specialization and impact of women in the discipline. “In practice, we have seen that social skills and confidence in one’s own abilities, along with the reality of being a mother, constitute the main challenges that women engineers have today,” commented María Angélica Ampuero, Computer Engineer at the Salmones Austral company.

Brilliant engineers

Ada Lovelace (1833) developed the first computer program; Mileva Maric (1896), extraordinary mathematician and physicist, led her partner, Albert Einstein, to formulate the theory of relativity; Katherine Johnson (1940), an African-American mathematician at NASA, obtained the Hubbard Medal for the calculations that made space exploration possible, and Justicia Acuña (1913), the first woman engineer in Chile and Latin America, are notable examples of women engineers.

Source: www.ulagos.cl