CreateHER Entrepreneurial Leadership Programme

CreateHER is a personal and professional career development programme targeted at female undergraduate students. The inaugural programme was run in the Autumn semester, and a second version is run in Spring Semester. CreateHER is designed to help female students build confidence, leadership skills, and an entrepreneurial mindset. During the six weeks, students explored topics like developing an entrepreneurial mindset, working in teams, turning ideas into action, and leadership for personal and career success. There were also some unique sessions on building strong networks (Network IQ) and learning how to thrive in uncertain situations (Safe Uncertainty Training). Each week female entrepreneurs and senior leaders provided guest lectures to the students providing practical can-do approaches and tips on how to succeed in entrepreneurial and leadership careers 

Universities are increasingly focusing on gender equality through Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives, and Athena Swan accreditation. CreateHER aligns with these goals by advancing Sustainable Development Goal 5 (Gender Equality) and enhancing UL's reputation for diversity and entrepreneurship. Women remain underrepresented in entrepreneurial ventures, face funding gaps, and encounter more barriers than men (GEM 2024, Enterprise Ireland 2025). Female students often have lower self-efficacy in entrepreneurship due to societal norms and a lack of role models (Goncalves et al., 2024). In Ireland, leadership roles are still male-dominated (CSO 2023, Gender Balance in Business Survey 2023). By targeting female undergraduates, CreateHER empowers female undergraduates by building entrepreneurial mindsets, leadership skills, confidence, and networks to help overcome these challenges and thrive. 

CreateHER is a multi institutional collaboration comprising of University of Galway IdeasLab, SETU, ATU, MTU, TUD. 

Guest speakers have included speakers from Axis BIC, Squarespace, Juspy and All Ireland Business Foundation. 

The results of a pre and post programme survey highlighted that participants experienced a strong increase in confidence, self reflection, leadership competencies, development of entrepreneurial mindset characteristics, networking skills and a more established network of contacts with entrepreneurs and female leaders which they would not have without participating on the programme. Post programme a number of students secured roles to work with and mentor pupils on the Student Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Transition Year students, and two students secured opportunities to participate in conferences run by one of the guest speakers – All Ireland Business Foundation.  

Ongoing evaluation and feedback discussions with participants demonstrate a strong level of satisfaction with the practical, engaged nature of the content and the impact of the workshop learnings and guest speakers. “CreateHER helped boost my confidence, I feel ready to network and back myself. The programme connected me with incredible and inspiring women and opened up a supportive network” Alekha Nysa Rodrigues 
 
The first and second programme was oversubscribed with keen interest and demand to run another version of the programme.