Geek Girls Carrots Celebrate

Cutting the cake, recalling the salad days and making big plans for the future – that’s how the female tech community celebrated its 4th birthday

The first thing one could probably spot entering Warsaw’s Marzyciele i Rzemieślnicy that evening was a lot of people (especially girls) and carroty balloons everywhere. As it turned out, the capital of Poland is where Geek Girls Carrots, a global tech community of women, have its roots.

“It all started 4 years ago here in Warsaw. Our first meetup gathered only 11 people, among whom were my friends, and friends of my friends”- recalls Kamila Sidor, the CEO of GGC, with a smile.

Geek Girls Carrots now operate in 10 countries, including Germany, Luxembourg, UK and USA. Their mission is to attract, educate and promote women in IT. Regular networking meetups and workshops in programming which already attracted over 2000 participants around the world are their ways to foster the geek spirit in every women. “It is all about meeting and inspiring each other,” grassroot girls point out.

This was no different this time. The birthday meetup included three sessions covering startups, entrepreneurship and tech industry as a whole, and an after party. Sylwia Pietrzak and Marta Tomasik from Pracuj.pl told about the challenges they had to face when creating their Hunt me app, Monika Synoradzka shared the story of Geek Girls Carrots, and Borys Musielak, Samba TV, pondered over the question of whether having a startup is a good idea or not.

Asked about the plans for the future, Kamila Sidor says “We would like to be everywhere.” The company has already revealed its plans to soon add another 4 cities to their list and roll out more workshops. They say getting girls into tech industry is quite easy. How to do it?

“Just organize something for girls and show them that they can do it, show them great examples of girls who succeeded in IT and just believe in them and they will start coding” argues Kamila.