How did the idea come about?What tipped the scales in favour of planning a podcast?

It was a great stroke of luck: Sarah Schleidt and I, who had never met before, both happened to attend a meeting of the equal opportunities team on the same day to get a taste of their work. The day was also about the question of how to publicise the services and topics of the equal opportunities team more effectively. Many ideas were thrown around and immediately discarded, but when the idea of a podcast was mentioned, everything happened very quickly: Sarah came out as a certified audio engineer and therefore had all the tools and skills to edit audio files professionally, and I came out as a hobby podcaster who has been regularly recording and publishing episodes in the podcasts of a cultural association since 2022. To everyone's delight, our expertise complemented each other perfectly, and there was no shortage of topics to podcast about in the team.

Why did you choose the podcast medium – apart from the fact that podcasts are popular with young people?

On the one hand, we chose the podcast medium because we enjoy listening to podcasts ourselves and Sarah and I already have experience of producing podcasts, and on the other hand because we believe it allows us to communicate our topics and content quite effectively: For example, we can literally let leading women in electrical engineering have their say and cover complex topics in a relaxed conversation. In principle, this would also be possible with video recordings for a YouTube channel, but it would be much more time-consuming. In any case, the video format tends to be shorter. Podcasts, on the other hand, provide enough space and time to go into more depth.

You want to attract young people to study electrical engineering as well as raise awareness of feminist and queer issues in the department – does that mean you have two different target groups in mind?

That's right, because if we want to ensure internally that more women and other underrepresented gender identities in electrical engineering dare to go into research or aspire to a management position, then we have to address them before they decide not to study electrical engineering and information technology, i.e. as external students. In most cases, this negative decision is based on prejudices or ignorance about engineering, and we want to counteract this with our programmes such as Girls' Day, the schoolgirl project days and now also our podcast. Once the external students have become internal students, the gender equality work does not end there and the podcast also looks inwards and outwards.