Balance4Better: “We Are HERe” More Than a Gender Campaign

Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls are part of the ultimate global challenge (Goal 5 of SDGs). The gender balance in STEM education is a challenge that has both horizontal and vertical dimensions. This paper focuses only on the first one. Politecnico di Torino, an Italian technical university with Engineering and Architectural courses, has a long history of attraction campaigns aiming to reduce the gender gap in its engineering enrolment. Despite these efforts, more remains to be done for the student population and high-level academic positions. During the academic year 2018/19, considering the engineering first-year enrolled students (around 4500), 25% were female, and a new innovative project was set, “WeAreHERe”. This campaign aims to introduce a new vision to overcome both recruitment and retention: the female students become the main actors of the project by a guided training that let establish them as fresh role models. The use of social media and new technology support this storytelling and reach a variety of Italian girls. In this paper, the structure of “WeAreHERe” is described with some data analysis of its impact.