Innovation in Digital Equality Award (IDEA) presented for the 4th time
With the Innovation in Digital Equality Award (IDEA), the Hamburg Senate has honoured forward-looking project ideas and outstanding commitment to equality for women in the digital space for the fourth time.
The IDEA sponsorship award went to two projects this year
Equal Opportunities Senator Katharina Fegebank awarded the prize, which is endowed with a total of 25,000 euros, to two startup projects at a Senate reception. MyProtectify uses digital devices to support victims of domestic violence - and these are still women in particular. To this end, the team around founder Sogol Kordi has developed an interactive and multilingual AI help chat that offers low-threshold access to individual information and contact points via a web interface or messenger.
Language is an instrument of power - those who are linguistically confident feel more capable of acting. This is precisely where the second prize-winning project EMPOWER-PSD, a collaboration between casuu.care and Bendula Consulting, comes in. The team led by founder Lioba Jarju and Dr. med. Rüdiger Schmitz has developed a learning platform that helps international nursing staff to formulate and set linguistic boundaries in cases of sexual discrimination and to practice these with virtual colleagues and patients without being exposed to the situation in real life.
The honorary award winner combines physics and gender research
The IDEA Honorary Award 2024 went to Prof. Dr. Monika Bessenrodt-Weberpals for her outstanding commitment to equality and diversity in STEM professions, science and the university landscape. The development of the Hamburg Open Online University (HOUU), a visionary project with access to education at a high scientific level for a broad public, has had a decisive impact on the debates about diversity and gender equality in Hamburg as a centre of science.
