STEM-HER
STEM-HER addresses women’s underrepresentation in STEM entrepreneurship through an AI-integrated education model. The project trains female students, PhD candidates, and academic staff, establishes Entrepreneurship Educators Hubs, and builds a sustainable pathway from STEM talent to venture creation and research-to-market impact.
Project Objectives
STEM-HER addresses one of the most persistent gaps in European and neighbouring innovation ecosystems: women’s underrepresentation in STEM entrepreneurship, research commercialisation, and venture creation. The project develops an AI-integrated entrepreneurship education model for women in STEM, training female students and PhD candidates through the IEM4W programme, academic staff through a “Women in STEM” train-the-trainer programme, and non-academic innovation staff through a micro-credential course. Entrepreneurship Educators Hubs anchor this work institutionally, sustaining training, mentoring, and cross-border cooperation beyond the project period.
Alongside its educational activities, STEM-HER pursues a research agenda examining how AI adoption shapes the entrepreneurial trajectories of women in STEM in post-conflict and gender-constrained contexts. Using a mixed-methods design combining surveys, qualitative interviews, and comparative institutional analysis, the research investigates how digital technologies alter women’s access to entrepreneurial knowledge, networks, and finance, and how AI-supported learning environments affect commercialisation confidence and venture intentions. The agenda connects questions of AI in education with wider debates on the societal implications of digitalisation, gender, and regional innovation capacity.
The project pursues four objectives:
- to build institutional capacity for women-led STEM entrepreneurship education;
- to equip women in STEM with AI, entrepreneurship, and IP management competences;
- to establish sustainable support structures through the Hubs, COIL learning, mentorship, and Living Labs;
- to generate peer-reviewed publications, policy papers, and open FAIR datasets informing inclusive innovation policy by 2028.
“I believe talent has no gender. With STEM-HER we give women in STEM the AI competences and entrepreneurial support to turn scientific knowledge into business.”
Dr. Tetiana Gorokhova
STEM-HER - Empowering Women in STEM with Entrepreneurial Skills for Innovation and Business Development
Project Duration: 09/2026 to 08/2028
Funded by the European Union / EIT Higher Education Initiative
Contact Person
Dr. Tetiana Gorokhova
tetiana.gorokhova@cais-research.de
Directly to …
Research Focus at CAIS
The research conducted at CAIS forms the scientific core of STEM-HER and examines how the adoption of artificial intelligence reshapes the entrepreneurial trajectories of women in STEM, focusing on post-conflict and gender-constrained contexts. Three questions guide the work:
Q1. How AI-supported learning environments change women’s access to entrepreneurial knowledge, networks, and finance?
Q2. How digital tools affect commercialisation confidence and venture intentions?
Q3. Which institutional conditions allow such effects to persist beyond individual training programmes?
The study follows a mixed-methods design, combining surveys of female STEM students and PhD candidates, qualitative interviews with founders, educators, and innovation staff, and comparative analysis of participating institutions. Data collection runs across partner institutions until 2028, allowing the research to trace changes over the full project cycle rather than at a single point in time. Situating these findings within research on the gendered digital divide and digital entrepreneurship, the project contributes to CAIS’s broader agenda on the societal implications of digitalisation, particularly at the intersection of AI, education, and inclusion.
Planned outputs include peer-reviewed publications, stakeholder policy papers, and open FAIR datasets documenting how AI-integrated entrepreneurial education operates under conditions of conflict and structural inequality.
Project Partners
The STEM-HER consortium brings together higher education institutions, research organisations, businesses, and civil society actors from across Europe and neighbouring countries, combining complementary expertise in STEM education, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, research commercialisation, and inclusive innovation.
Project Partners:
- Mykolas Romeris University (Lead Partner), Lithuania
- Admiral Makarov National University of Shipbuilding, Ukraine
- CJSC “Kombinati Shiri Dushanbe”, Tajikistan
- Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) gGmbH, Germany
- Dmytro Motornyi Tavria State Agrotechnological University, Ukraine
- IWEK e.V. Initiative für Wissensaustausch, Empowerment und Kultur e.V., Germany
- Joint Stock Company SDG, Lithuania
- Mykolaiv Water Hub, Ukraine
- PE ODVARKO EVHEN LEONOVYCH, Ukraine
- State Higher Educational Institution “Pryazovskyi State Technical University”, Ukraine
- Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
- Tajik State University of Finance and Economics, Tajikistan
- Tajik Technical University named after M.S. Osimi, Tajikistan
- KYIV AVIATION INSTITUTE” STATE UNIVERSITY STATE NON COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE, Ukraine
