Female college students discover smart city occupations - Veolia and the Elles Bougent association join forces to encourage vocations
Elles construisent la ville de demain (Girls Building the Cities of Tomorrow) is the first smart city occupations event organised by the Elles Bougent (Girls on the Move) association. The event was a chance for female college students from Hector Guimard Sixth Form College in Paris’ 19th arrondissement – a college specialising in building industry, crafts and built heritage occupations – to meet female Veolia mentors at the group’s head office in Aubervilliers and find out about their areas of expertise.
While visiting the Veolia head office, the female students discovered Hubgrade, Veolia’s smart monitoring solution which collects and analyses water, energy and waste data. The sixth form students then took part in a design thinking workshop on real-time monitoring of energy and environmental performance in this “smart" building.
“Veolia is inventing solutions for the smart city of tomorrow. Cities are switching to digital technology to manage their infrastructure in order to keep pace with the increasing complexity and the increase in environmental risks”, explained Laurent Auguste, Veolia’s Senior Executive Vice President, Development, Innovation and Markets.
For Veolia, diversity and achieving a gender balance play an important role in social cohesion, as well as being performance levers and a source of creativity. The group has set itself the goal of 30% of managers being female by 2020. The figure stood at 26.5% in 2017.
Elles construisent la ville de demain initiative
500 female secondary school, sixth form college and university students in Paris, Grenoble, Orléans, Nancy, Montpellier, Rouen, Lille, Troyes and Guadeloupe learned about the sheer range of smart city occupations in the following sectors, all thanks to the Elles Bougent association and its partners: building industry, civil engineering, energy, networks, water, waste management and treatment, environment, air quality and mobility.
Elles Bougent association
Since 2006, Elles Bougent has been working to get female secondary school, sixth form college and university students to discover engineering and technical occupations. The association aims to demonstrate that these occupations are accessible to girls and also wants to enable teenagers to identify with and make plans for their futures by listening to the personal accounts of female mentors and students. The final goal is to encourage vocations. Elles Bougent brings together 1,110 secondary school students, 1,510 college students, 5,700 university students, 3,860 mentors, 171 partners, and 608 secondary schools and sixth form colleges.
