Girls in Tech Conference: A Conference Hosted by Girls for Girls to Close the Gender Gap

April 20th 2026

Seeing is believing.

The 9th annual Girls in Tech Conference brought 130 grade 6 to 8 girls together from across the Greater Toronto Area to University of Toronto Schools on April 11 for an inspiring day of exciting hands-on tech workshops, women in tech speaking panels and networking, all to inspire them to pursue their interests in the technology sector surrounded by a supportive community

The entire event is entirely organized by an executive team of six UTS high school students – S6s (grade 12s) Elaine, Sophia and Niqat, S5s (grade 11s) Dora and Edlyn and M4 (grade 10) Alix – because even though women are making progress, technology remains a male-dominated field.

“In a lot of tech areas, and I've seen this in some of my STEM classes and clubs both at UTS and beyond, it's very male-dominated,” says Alix. “The issue is improving, but it's still definitely an issue. Having this safe space to discover what they’re interested in allows girls to get together and learn about tech and get interested is a good way to combat that gender inequality.”

With 10 different types of workshops, plus career panel discussions with women in tech, the event became a true community gathering with about 40 speakers and workshop presenters, including some UTS staff, and about 30 UTS student volunteers. “We do outreach to 420 schools, and students from 68 schools attended this year from public school boards across the GTA, and independent schools too,” says Sophia.

Girls created their own animated character in a workshop led by Switch Animation, a local VFX and animation production company. They learned about gender bias in AI in a session led by Hakergal, an organization that empowers Canadian girls and gender-diverse youth to become the STEAM leaders of tomorrow.

“GITCon is also about making connections that are very local, so that the girls can continue the relationships beyond the conference,” says GITCon staff supervisor Jenny Pitt-Lainsbury, UTS vice principal of academic operations and interim head of senior school.

For example, the Maker Bean Cafe, just down Bloor Street West, taught 3D printing and offered space in their camps for participants, forging connections that endure beyond the conference.

UTS student clubs also are involved. Elaine, as a member of the UTS Competitive Coding Club, helped the club plan a workshop that taught the girls how to code introductory Python.

Dora worked with the UTS Sustainability and Environmental Action Committee to create a new workshop for 2026 using Google’s Teachable Machine. “We wanted to provide an introduction to how artificial intelligence works, based on identifying and then training models,” she says. “In the workshops, we had the girls show the models pictures of recycling versus garbage, and then help the model learn how to identify whether to put something in the recycling or the garbage. We know using AI has a lot of environmental impacts but the workshop was giving the perspective that AI can also be good for the environment.”

GITCon also forges partnerships – one with Deloitte allowed a group of GITCon participants to win a tour of their office, which the GITCon organizers and Jenny also attended.

The keynote, delivered by Simran Kaur, a cyber threat intelligence analyst at Sun Life, shared real-world examples of cybersecurity threats while also providing practical advice for participants’ online lives.

Planning GITCon is a major endeavour, and UTS student leaders start organizing the event in early fall, developing their fundraising, networking, conference planning and logistics skills.

“It is a lot of organization,” says Elaine. “Hosting GITCon is especially valuable because it really allowed me to connect with many tech companies and very distinguished women in tech. It also taught me the workings of such a large conference, and how to do things better and how to make sure everything runs smoothly. It's an experience that I learned a lot from.”

In the afternoon of the conference, UTS student volunteers moderated panels featuring women in tech, including UTS alum Winnie Zhao ’13, a web accessibility specialist and software engineer at Rakuten Kobo and two young UTS alumni who shared their experiences at University of Toronto. Angela Zheng ’21 is in her first year of computer science and physics, and Eila Farnood ’23 is a third-year engineering science student majoring in machine intelligence, who served as a GITCon executive when she was a UTS student.

They, along with the other panelists further along in their careers, addressed questions about their challenges and successes, role models, how girls can overcome stigmas in tech and the question, “Have you ever been the only woman in the room and what was that like?”

At GITCon, instead of being the only woman in the room, the panelists are in a room filled with women, inspiring the next generation of girls to become high tech leaders.