Tech4Elles (WHAT06): Structuring Mentorship to Open Digital Careers to Young Girls
Interview by Pascale Caron
On the occasion of Digital Women’s Day, organized on April 17 at MonacoTech, the WHAT06 association (Women Hackers Action Tank 06) will highlight one of its flagship projects: Tech4Elles.
An initiative designed not as a communication campaign, but as an operational mentorship program aimed at reducing self-censorship, promoting young girls’ orientation toward technology careers, and creating human bridges between generations.
Tech4Elles does not seek to “sell” Tech. The project primarily aims to make these careers visible, understandable, and embodied. It’s about enabling a young girl to dialogue with a woman who actually works in a digital profession. This encounter often serves as the first trigger.
A Structural Problem of Projection, Before a Skills Problem
Despite the abundance of discourse on gender diversity, digital fields remain overwhelmingly male-dominated. Statistics show a persistent reality: women remain a minority in engineering, data, cybersecurity, or artificial intelligence careers. This situation does not reflect a capacity deficit, but a projection deficit.
From an early age, many young girls stop considering these careers, not because they consider themselves incapable, but because they cannot identify any role model to connect with. The professions remain vague, abstract, sometimes associated with stereotypes of isolation, extreme technicality, or social disconnection.
This is precisely the entry point that WHAT06 has chosen to address. The Women Hackers Action Tank 06 was built around a simple logic: inclusion does not progress through injunction, but through concrete mechanisms. The collective brings together digital professionals who share the conviction that access to technology careers begins with access to information, exchanges, and role models. Over the years, the association has developed awareness campaigns, workshops, meetings, but also digital projects. Tech4Elles represents the logical culmination of this approach.
Tech4Elles: A Mentorship Platform Designed as Social Infrastructure
Tech4Elles is a mobile application whose primary function is to connect high school girls with mentors from Tech professions. These mentors work in various fields: software development, data, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud, information systems, digital design, or product.
The logic is deliberately simple. A young girl creates a profile, enters her interests, questions, and hesitations. A mentor describes her background, profession, and areas of expertise. A matching system then suggests relevant pairs.
The application is not intended to structure the relationship over time. It serves as a starting point. The heart of the project remains the human relationship.
For a high school student, the difficulty is not only choosing a field. The difficulty is understanding what a profession actually entails. Behind a title such as “data scientist” or “software engineer” lie very different realities.
Mentorship provides concrete answers. It allows understanding what a workday looks like. It helps identify possible educational paths. It enables discussion of encountered difficulties, mistakes made, and pivots. Tech4Elles thus introduces guidance through dialogue rather than prescription.
A Community of Mentors, Not a Collection of Isolated Pairs
Since some mentees are minors, WHAT06 has chosen to implement a strict mentor selection process. Profiles are manually reviewed. Identities and contact information are verified. Preliminary exchanges are organized before validation. This framework aims to guarantee a secure environment, but also consistent quality of support.
The project does not rely solely on individual relationships. WHAT06 facilitates a community of mentors. Regular exchange sessions allow sharing information about training programs, schools, Parcoursup updates, or new educational pathways. This organization enables knowledge pooling and prevents each mentor from remaining isolated when facing sometimes complex questions.
Laure Gajetti’s Role in Tech4Elles
Among the volunteers involved in the project is Laure Gajetti, a data specialist. Her background precisely illustrates the diversity of possible paths toward technology careers.
Trained in applied mathematics and physical sciences, she gradually oriented herself toward data science, then toward data governance and flow architecture. She has worked in software publishing contexts, technology industries, and SMEs, with a constant thread: structuring data to give it meaning.
In the organizations she has supported, her role has consisted of designing data warehouses, implementing pipelines, organizing information quality. And above all, explaining to teams why this data exists and how it should be used.
This approach is central to her vision: data is not an isolated technical asset. It constitutes an organizational backbone.
Within WHAT06, Laure particularly works on data protection issues and participates in the product structuring of Tech4Elles. Her presence brings both technical and systemic perspective to the project.
But her contribution goes beyond her expertise. Her background demonstrates that there is no typical profile for entering Tech. There are trajectories, trials, detours, reconstructions. This is exactly the message that Tech4Elles seeks to convey.
An Impact-Oriented Project
Tech4Elles aims for concrete effects. The ambition is to progressively increase the number of young girls pursuing digital fields. It must reduce dropouts linked to poorly informed choices and strengthen confidence in the ability to succeed in these domains. Eventually, the platform could also become an observation tool for orientation trends, identifying domains that generate the most questions or interest.
The choice of a digital tool responds to several imperatives. It makes the program accessible without geographical constraints. It facilitates progressive scaling of the number of pairs. It offers minimal usage traceability, useful for service improvement. But the tool remains secondary. The purpose remains the relationship.
A Project Still Under Construction
Tech4Elles currently has a functional prototype and an initial community of mentors. Current needs concern improving ergonomics, strengthening matching, adding monitoring mechanisms, and raising the security level.
These developments require modest funding on an industrial scale, but significant for an association operating mainly on own funds and volunteerism.
A Local Response to a Global Challenge
Territorial anchoring constitutes one of the project’s strengths. Mentors are geographically close. Schools can be directly involved. Local companies can become partners. This proximity creates a trust ecosystem, difficult to reproduce in purely national programs.
Tech4Elles operates a subtle but decisive shift. It is no longer about explaining to young girls what they should do. It is about enabling them to meet those who are already doing it. This passage from discourse to relationship undoubtedly constitutes the project’s most structuring contribution. Tech4Elles is neither a symbolic program nor a simple application. It is a lightweight social infrastructure, designed to provoke decisive encounters.
Through this project, WHAT06 acts directly on one of the deepest levers of gender diversity in Tech: early access to role models, concrete information, and confidence.
