OIFem

During my time in high school, when I competed regularly in informatics olympiads, I noticed a very large gender gap, where girls usually made up under 5% of participants, and I was almost always the only one in the room. This motivated me to co-found the Spanish Informatics Olympiad for Girls (OIFem), a non-profit with the objective of helping teenage girls in Spain find their path in computer science, and discover opportunities in the tech world. OIFem was transformative for the presence of women in competitive programming contests in Spain. Some of our students' achievements include:

• More medals from girls from 2020 onwards (year where organisation was set up) in the (mixed) Spanish Informatics Olympiad than in all years until then (1997-2020). The same holds if you just look at gold medals.
• The first victory of a women's team in HP Codewars Spain. The main programming competition for teams in Spain had never seen a single woman in its winning team, and our students won with an all-female team.
• Classifying every year since the non-profit's creation to represent Spain in the most prestigious mixed international competitions, like the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), the Iberoamerican Informatics Olympiad (CIIC) and the Western European Olympiad in Informatics (WEOI). Out students have obtained numerous medals in these.
• Frequent admissions to top universities.
• A really healthy cycle of giving back to the community, where students that graduate high school very frequently join OIFem as volunteers to help the next generation.

During this period, the work we were doing in the non-profit got a lot of visibility. I especially liked this article in El País highlighting our students' record-breaking performance in Turkey, and being on the front cover of Cinco Días, the main financial newspaper in Spain. Pedro Sánchez, President of Spain, also recognised my work as an inspiration for the 2025 Digitalisation Plan for Spain.

I ran this organisation, where I managed 30+ people, for the first four years of its existence. After this time, I stepped aside to let a team of former students take charge. Our main activity (everything, including trips, was free for students) consisted of:

• Data structures and algorithms classes: we taught weekly classes throughout the school year in small groups, sending practice problem sets for students to train between sessions. There were classes of all levels, from introductions to programming to coaching for national and international informatics olympiads.
• Personalised attention: students would have one or more volunteers that they could contact outside of lessons to discuss problems they were stuck on, receive plans catered to them, and get coding advice.
• Yearly contest: we organised a national competition for all the students once a year where, after some online selection phases, the finalists would come to compete in person for four spots in the Spanish delegation for the European Girls' Informatics Olympiad (EGOI).
• Insight into the tech industry: our activities were sponsored by companies of the likes of Amazon and BBVA. This meant that students could regularly attend talks with their employees, and connect with them for future opportunities.