Portuguese Women in Tech was launched in April 2016, by Liliana Castro and Inês Santos Silva, with a dual mission: we want to support women in technology by providing visibility, networking, mentorship and by creating trainings and other opportunities. But we also want to attract more women and girls to tech and in this way, increase the pipeline.

So far

• We started by showcasing the women of the Portuguese Startup Scene. In our website, we started telling the stories of the women that were building the Portuguese Tech Scene.
• We then started to organize events and workshops. From workshops on productivity and the Web Summit to bigger events like the Portuguese Women in Tech Awards and the PWIT Hackathon. 
• We launched our first booklet, with the help of ScaleUp Porto, that was distributed to girls in the schools of the Porto region. And we launched a second edition with the support of EDP.
• We also launched a mentorship program, a bookclub and a female founders entrepreneurship program.
• And we created several tools like the Portuguese Women in Tech Speakers List, the Salary Transparency Project and the Pioneers Report.  

In the next few years, we want:

• To attract more women to technology. To do that, we want to change the perception of what means to be a developer. Today, if we ask you to close your eyes and think about a software developer, 90% of you will think about a guy in jeans and hoodie working through the night and drink energy drinks. Why can’t we have multiple profiles? We are seeing that technology is too important to be controlled by a small part of the population, so we need more women to bring a different perspective for the opportunities and challenges of technology. 
• We also want to see more women in leadership roles and building companies. Data from Silicon Valley shows that only 17% of the companies have a female founder and that in 2018 only 2% of Venture Capital money went to female led companies (this number is probably smaller in Portugal).

We believe that:

We have lots of work to do and everyone needs to be involved. Women and Men need to be in this fight together. Companies, governments and individuals need to take concrete actions to change perceptions and break the glass ceiling. And we need to do this, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because advancing women’s equality can add $12 trillion to global growth!