The initiative to establish a women's network at the Faculty of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering was started by Bettina Mihalyi. After restructuring at the faculties, she was assigned to our faculty in her function as Dean of Studies of Process Engineering. Previously, she had worked at the Faculty of Chemistry and was actively involved in the women's network FemChem there. After the change of faculty, it was clear to Bettina that such a women's network could also be helpful for the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. Without further ado, she organized a workshop for the women of the scientific staff in February 2021, in which the concept of a network was presented.

After three hours of substantive discussion of the current situation of women at the faculty and reflection exercises, the all-important question came: would we like to establish a network? Although the anonymous voting reflected great willingness, there was silence in the virtual room at first when the call for promoters of the network was made. Because of Covid, the workshop took place online and we met in person for the first time in July 2021, see photo.

The silence was then broken by Wilma Archodoulaki: "Alright, let's do it, I'll be a promoter". With that, the hesitation was over, and five women accompanied the initial period of the network as promoters and kept the initiative alive.

During another online workshop in April, we found our name femTUme, out of an overwhelming list of highly creative alternative suggestions (see our brainstorming in the picture).
FemTUme is made up of three parts: fem can stand for "female" or "feminist," TU indicates that we are here at the university and can be read as English for to ("to"). "Me" is short for "mechanical engineering" or together with the middle part "to me", which is English for "to me".

After we decided on our name and defined our goals more precisely, we were able to focus on growing as a network and organizing different projects and events. We also received invaluable support from the Dean's Office, which provided funding for a study assistant and several events. Past and planned events can be found here.