Digital Female Leader Award: These are the winners

The final prize goes to Katharina Schmidt, CEO and co-founder of Apic.ai. The company is dedicated to automated pollinator monitoring. With this, she wants to make a contribution to combating global insect extinction. With the help of camera-based technology, bees can be used as biosensors. The technology is installed at the entrance to the hives and is intended to generate quantitative data on the effects of pesticides, for example. By detecting effects such as a reduction in activity or pollination behavior that could not previously be measured, the aim is to improve the risk assessment of pesticides. The prizewinner Schmidt had the idea for the company when she was dealing with the issue of insect mortality as a hobby beekeeper. She realized that countermeasures are difficult without suitable data. She now wants to collect such data with Apic.ai.

Ursula Mühle has dedicated herself to digitalization in the healthcare sector since the start of her career, establishing the Graduate School of Information Science in Health at the Technical University of Munich for this purpose, analysing the implementation of systems in the public sector for PwC and now heading up the Care Task Force at the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety. She will receive the award in the "Career" category on the 17th day. In her role as head of the nursing task force, she has initiated a digital online portal that always provides up-to-date information on the situation of the corona pandemic in nursing homes anonymously and in compliance with data protection regulations. She is also setting up a Europe-wide "Digital Health Learning Platform" and supporting an information campaign against poverty among women in old age.

The next winner in the "IT-Tech" category is pursuing a big goal: Katharina Schüller wants to create a global standard for Data & AI Literacy. The collection and evaluation of data and the ethical use of artificial intelligence should be firmly integrated into school and university curricula. To this end, Schüller has launched a project together with the Federation of National Statistical Societies, the AI Campus Berlin, the Stifterverband and the OECD. She has also published guidelines for data literacy courses at universities, a charter and the app "Stadt, Land, Datenfluss". In 2003, she founded her own company, which analyzes data volumes from companies and derives recommendations from them.

The corona pandemic has caused the second-hand market to boom. The start-up Mädchenflohmarkt, founded in 2012 by the then 22-year-old Maria Spilka, also benefited from this. She is the winner of the "Lifestyle" category. Her company Mädchenflohmarkt offers second-hand fashion for sale as well as the opportunity to send in your own clothes and sell them via the platform - for which the company receives a commission. It also works with companies such as About You and Breuninger and organizes their second-hand business. In 2020, the start-up grew by 50 percent and generated double-digit million sales.

Salome Preiswerk is the name of the winner of the 14th day of the Journey to Diversity. She wins the "FinTech Money" category. Preiswerk founded the digital asset management company Whitebox together with Birte Rothkopf in 2016. The law graduate started her career in management consulting and then worked for various credit institutions. Preiswerk also advises the German government on the Fintech Council. Based on a value approach, Whitebox offers the digital management of assets by investing in ETFs.

On day 13, the "New Work" category will be chosen. The winner is Daniela Steens, who works at DB Fernverkehr. She heads up the "Modern Working Worlds" project there and introduced two apps for employees to make shift planning more individual and easier. This makes it easy to swap shifts or plan them yourself. The trained travel agent and economics graduate has worked in various areas of the DB Group since the start of her career.

The twelfth prize goes to Anna Weber. She is Co-CEO of Babyone and is being honored in the "Digital Transformation" category because her company is undergoing just such a transformation process. On January 1, 2021, Weber took over Babyone from her parents together with her brother Jan-Willem Weischer. Especially since the coronavirus crisis, the baby retailer has had to become more digital. The company is taking a number of steps to become fitter for the future. Among other things, Weber is having the workspaces at the company headquarters redesigned for more flexible working. Money is also being invested in the company's IT infrastructure. In addition, online and offline retail are increasingly being networked. Employees are learning with the help of an e-learning platform. The next step in the transformation: an innovation hub supported by an advisory board of start-up entrepreneurs.

Ursula Wolf is the winner of the prize in the "Health" category, which was awarded on the eleventh day of the "Journey to Diversity". The specialist in internal medicine is Head of Pharmacotherapy Management at Halle University Hospital. She tackled her field of activity in a particularly digital way. After taking over as Head of Pharmacotherapy Management, she made it possible, among other things, to capture a "digital overall picture" of a patient within six and a half minutes - including all important aspects of the disease, diagnoses, cardiovascular data, laboratory values, ECG and diagnostic findings. This enabled her to adapt the patient's medication list entirely on the basis of specialist information and interactions. Her model led to international publications, the option of a habilitation and a planned promotion to senior physician.

Lelia König receives the tenth prize in the "Mobility" category. At the end of 2019, she and her partner Sandro Beck founded the start-up Dashfactory, which manufactures dashcams for bicycles. The recorded data is analyzed anonymously and can be taken into account in the traffic planning of cities and municipalities. The start-up now employs 13 people and works together with the city of Leipzig.

The next winner already has a lot of expertise in her industry: Dana von der Heide used to work for Deutsche Post and is a member of the advisory board of the German Logistics Association. She won the prize in the "Innovation" category with her logistics start-up Parcel Perform, which she founded in 2016. Retailers can use the parcel tracking software to provide their customers with a more precise arrival date for their ordered goods. The start-up works with more than 600 logistics companies worldwide.

She has already won an award, and now she can add another one to the list: Nancy Wang has won the "Digital Leadership" category. The US-American is Managing Director at Amazon Web Services and has built up various start-ups such as Rubrik. In 2017, she founded the organization Advancing Women in Tech, which has set itself the task of giving women and other marginalized groups in the tech industry more visibility and connecting them with each other. The organization is also based in Berlin.

Of course, one category in particular should not be missing from the Journey to Diversity: The prize for "Diversity" goes to Olaolu Fajembola and Tebogo Niminde-Dundadegar from the Berlin start-up Tebalou. They ensure more diversity in children's rooms and sell everything a child's heart desires, from puzzles and craft items to dolls. It's all about identification and representation: the doll is black, the crayons for skin coloring contain all possible shades of people and the puzzle ends up being the country Ghana. The founders are also the authors of the book "Gib mir mal die Hautfarbe" (Give me the color of your skin), which helps adults deal with racism in their children's upbringing.

On the sixth day, Freda Katunda received the prize in the "Social Hero" category. With her start-up Leap, she offers healthcare courses for the African continent via an e-learning platform. Katunda hopes that this will lead to an increase in medical professionals and a global exchange of knowledge and experience. To this end, the company works with healthcare institutions and the courses cover topics such as nutrition for chronic diseases, an overview of current drug research and the use of data in the healthcare system.

The prize in the "Entrepreneurship" category was won by the founders of Codary GmbH, Antonia Schein and Amanda Maiwald. The prize was also awarded in Berlin on November 12. The company is a digital education provider that aims to provide young people with programming training. In weekly video chats, students teach children between the ages of 10 and 16 programming languages such as Python in small groups. This is intended to be playful and user-friendly due to the young target group. A learning app and an online learning platform are also designed to support children. In this way, they should be able to get started in computer science - and have fun. There are now over 400 young users.

The "Audience Award" was won by influencer Florentine Kleemann. The medical student has been providing information about the coronavirus pandemic on her Instagram channel @fleurbardot since March 2020. Almost 18,000 subscribers now follow her explanatory videos and posts, which she uses to allay fears and help overcome the pandemic. Kleemann has also caught the attention of a number of cooperation partners: She plays the lead role in the ZDF documentary series "Heart & Viruses" and is an ambassador for the German Center for Cardiovascular Research and the German Heart Center Berlin.

Anne Kriesel received the award in the "Purpose Communications" category on November 10. She is the founder of the digital network Bohana.de, where mourners can connect with bereavement counselors and funeral directors after the death of a loved one. The platform also provides information about funerals, mourning and preparing for one's own death. Kriesel does not receive any investor or advertising money: All information should be available to mourners free of charge. Since its launch last year, the platform has attracted 120 partners from the funeral and bereavement industry. Three times a year, Kriesel invites them to a virtual exchange with a keynote speech.

The second prize was awarded on November 9 in the "Legal" category - also in Berlin. It went to the fully qualified lawyer Alisha Andert. The co-founder of the consulting firm "This is Legal Design" has set herself the task of designing innovations at the interface between people, law and technology: Through her work, law firms, legal departments, companies, legal expenses insurers and the public sector are to develop - and also use - digital solutions that work. Andert is also Chair of the Board of the Legal Tech Association. As part of this role, she supported the law to promote consumer-friendly offerings on the legal services market, which was passed in the Bundestag. This is intended to be an important step towards enabling lawyers to develop digital business models.

On the first day of the Journey to Diversity, November 8, the first prize was awarded. The tour starts in Berlin: Dr. Julia Stamm receives the Digital Female Leader Award in the "Global Hero" category. In 2019, she founded The Futures Project (TFP), a non-profit initiative that operates worldwide. TFP has set itself the task of advocating for a better future through innovation and system change. To achieve this, the initiative aims to support and connect people from all over the world who are fighting for this goal. For example, TFP organizes a fellowship programme for people who are driving forward social and technological innovations.