A group of female secondary school pupils from the Heerbeeck College visited DIFFER during Girls’ Day. This national initiative was organized on Thursday 10 April 2025 by VHTO. The aim? To get girls aged 10 to 15 interested in STEM at a young age.
During the visit, the girls got a glimpse of working at a research institute like DIFFER. After a plunge into the mechanical workshop, they attended soldering and programming workshops and met male and female researchers during the ‘DIFFER demo carousel’. Educational set-ups made the story concrete and tangible. For example, the girls learned more about magnetism, the link between donuts and nuclear fusion and splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Loes Jansen, researcher in the Energy Systems and Control group at DIFFER, was one of the DIFFER employees that showed her work to the girls: “I’m happy to have been able to show how fun and fascinating STEM is during Girls' Day. We would like to encourage more girls to follow their interest in science and engineering. With creative and hands-on experiences, we hope to get everyone excited.”
Why Girls' Day?
Girls' Day is an annual event where thousands of girls meet companies in STEM, engineering and IT. On Girls' Day, girls visit companies in the engineering and IT sectors across the country. This gives them an accessible way to learn about these fields, which increases the chances that they will later choose a career in this sector. Girls and women are still underrepresented in technical courses and professions. Only 17% of workers in STEM, engineering and IT are women. Therefore, DIFFER considers it important to participate in this initiative, and to give a positive and enthusiastic experience to female pupils.
Sahar Yadegari, director of VHTO: “We are very happy that during this Girls' Day, hundreds of companies in the Netherlands participated. This allowed thousands of girls to experience that engineering is also their world, that they can do it and that they like it. Girls and women should be able to influence future engineering and technology, because our society is increasingly defined by it.”
VHTO is the Dutch centre of expertise for the technical development of women and girls in STEM. Read more about the work of VHTO on the website.
Author: Rianne van Hoek
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