Our Story

Our Mission

Formed in 2016, UNSW Women in Technology (WIT) is currently a network of over 3000 students that aims to collaborate, empower, and up-skill female and male students within STEM to encourage diversity within the technology industry.

At WIT, we are proud of being able to provide opportunities that develop all students' professional and technical skills. Whether it's personal, academic, or social, we want our members to become the best version of themselves.

Our society captures a diverse range of disciplines, enabling us to inspire students from various backgrounds by providing them with a variety of events and multimedia resources such as blogs, podcasts, videos, guides to succeeding professionally and within uni, hackathons, course revision workshops, professional development workshops, and so much more!

Our Mascot

Have you met Willow? Willow is WIT's trusty mascot and biggest supporter. Willow, like us, shares a dislike of bugs (the crawley kind and the codey kind) and believes in empowering all creatures. Willow is only four years old but she understands the power of nurturing young creatures and showing them how to navigate the forest. When she's not burrowed under the desk having a quick snooze, she can be found munching on a shrub salad and cheering on the WIT team in everything they do.

Willow debuted as WIT's mascot in 2020, and has been bringing laughter and motivation to our community ever since! In 2021, Willow was brought to life from the screen to O-Week as a handmade crocheted plushie. Through a cute live-action photo shoot, styled with her favourite orange flower, Willow recreated iconic WIT memes and embodied every stage of a student in tech - from fuelling up on coffee to taking power naps during study sessions.

Our History

Women in Technology was founded by UNSW STEM students, Silvia Lin and her co-founders Rachel Lin, Emily Chen, Anushka Dutt, Chelsea Leung, Karen Huang and Kris Mansfield.

The vision which sparked WIT was to empower and unite female students studying technology disciplines by providing a platform to share experiences and knowledge. They were passionate about wanting to ensure that young women were better informed about the opportunities within technology and had a network to support them. The team's goals were centralised around breaking the stereotypes of the tech industry and forming a close-knit community where they could provide support for each other, both in pursuing a career in tech and developing themselves as individuals.

Today, WIT continues to uphold their vision and grow with many more upcoming initiatives to come.

202420232022202120202019201820172016

WIT's Journey in 2024

  • Expanded to 95 internal team members, a 30% increase from 2023
  • Gained the support of 26 sponsors, including 3 affiliations and 8 partnerships
  • Enhanced and continued 3 flagship events and 6 new workshops from the Education Portfolio
  • Released 33 publications, including 3 flagship publications, fortnightly WCWs, and new IT publications
  • Produced 21 videos, built on short-form content on TikTok
  • Delivered 3 IT projects, expanding on last year’s initiatives such as the Empowerment Program website and Discord Bot