TU Wien Informatics

Actions We Take:
In Student Life

We support our female students with measures that highlight and reward their excellence, raise gender awareness, and involve them in research.

The winners of the 2019 Siemens Award for Excellence: Tina Stamencic, Marie Stadlbauer, Sanja Pavlovic, Lea Salome Brugger, Monika Meczkowski and Carina Pratsch with Kurt Hofstädter (Siemens AG), Reinhard Pichler (TU Wien), Michael Heiss (Siemens AG) and Hannes Werthner (TU Wien)
The winners of the 2019 Siemens Award for Excellence: Tina Stamencic, Marie Stadlbauer, Sanja Pavlovic, Lea Salome Brugger, Monika Meczkowski and Carina Pratsch with Kurt Hofstädter (Siemens AG), Reinhard Pichler (TU Wien), Michael Heiss (Siemens AG) and Hannes Werthner (TU Wien)
Picture: Amélie Chapalain / TU Wien Informatics

Our Programs

Siemens Award for Excellence

Since 2014 and in generous cooperation with Siemens AG Austria, outstanding female students of both bachelor and master programs are honored with the annual Siemens Award for Excellence. The grant, endowed with € 1.000, is given to the best female students of the academic year at the prestigious Epilog event. Students do not apply for this award since the sole criteria are progress in studies, weighted grade average, and acquired ECTS.

Helmut Veith Stipend

The Helmut Veith Stipend is awarded annually to motivated female students in the field of informatics who pursue (or plan to pursue) one of our english-language master programs. Students who are awarded the Helmut Veith Stipend, receive € 6.000 annually for a duration of up to two years and TU Wien’s tuition fees are waived. It is dedicated to the memory of the eponymous outstanding computer scientist and colleague who worked in the fields of logic in computer science, computer-aided verification, software engineering, and computer security.

Undergraduate Assistantships

To give qualified and interested female students the opportunity to provide an initial introduction to research, we allocate positions for undergraduate assistants. Each research unit can apply for a maximum of one such position per year, and since 2016, seven such assistantships have been created.

Involve Female Students in Research

We specifically address individual female students to involve them as predoctoral assistants in research projects, bring them to conferences, and to promote their potential career with us.

Strategy And Teaching

Causal Research: Fixing the Leaky Informatics Pipe

A Herculean task is fixing the leaky pipe that are our bachelor programs: Just under 20% of first-year students are female. Even worse: Only half of those eventually graduate. Based on the Strategy Document on the Advancement of Women in Informatics (2016) , we are therefore planning a meaningful empirical investigation, which shall provide information about causes, falsify or verify existing assumptions, and enable us to counteract.

Gender-sensitive Teaching

To keep female students, we implement gender-sensitive and inclusive teaching, which refers equally to the interests and topics of the heterogeneous student group, especially of female and male students. In the first step, we survey the status quo of the technical methodology in select representative first-year courses. The result will form the foundation for a catalog of ideas to develop productive gender-sensitive teaching methods and contents. The module “Transferable Skills” of the informatics curricula shall help our students develop qualifications that play a significant role in everyday professional life and go beyond the typical technical knowledge and skills. Since the 1990s, this catalog has included courses in the field of gender awareness.