Get It Made launches 2024 fund to support women in STEM

Manufacturing specialist Get It Made has announced the launch of its 2024 grant to help encourage the next generation of women in UK engineering by taking female-led organisations to the next level.

Launched to mark International Women’s Day, the initiative has been set up to encourage and support projects being driven by female-founded or female-led engineering, design, tech and manufacturing enterprises, including start-ups. The winner will get to benefit from Get It Made’s manufacturing expertise to help scale up production and move the business forward.

First launched in 2022, the annual initiative is once again expected to attract hundreds of applicants from all over the UK in its support of female entrepreneurship in traditionally male-dominated sectors.

Applications are now open until 31^st July and can be entered here. The grant, worth £5,000, is available to engineering enterprises with fewer than 10 employees.

2023 grant winner Stiliyana Minkovska, Founder and CEO of gynae health start-up Matrix, said: “Grants like this are so important on many levels, not least to address the bigger picture, to give a much-needed platform and voice for FemTech innovators. They allow women to build for women, so products like Matrix can get to the prototyping phase, thus enhancing the opportunity for gaining further visibility and bringing it a step closer to reality.

“The grant has enabled us to produce various prototypes to potentially distribute to multiple potential early adopters and users – specialist practitioners from OBGYNs to nurses and GPs. Our project has the potential to not only save lives and improve outcomes for patients, but also empower females and help reduce health inequalities in women around the world. The support from Get It Made has helped us propel our business forward and take our goal one step closer, something which may not have been possible or might have been even more difficult to achieve otherwise.”

Luke Smoothy, Founder of Get It Made, commented: “Through offering our state-of-the-art manufacturing services, we’re committed in supporting female-driven innovation through ground-breaking projects which have the potential to improve efficiencies and even save lives. We’ve taken a practical step to align with this year’s IWD theme, Inspire Inclusion; as a sector where women are still underrepresented, manufacturing is just one of many industries which needs to take further action and be more actively engaged in driving gender parity and raising awareness about discrimination.”