Opening the Workshop: Women into STEM

This year we set ourselves one ambitious goal: to get significantly more women into STEM. East Essex Hackspace is Essex's first hackspace, a volunteer-run community workshop in Hawkwell with no paid staff, giving everyone hands-on access to wood, metal, 3D printing, laser-cutting, electronics and textiles, and we rebuilt the way people enter making to achieve it.

Rather than asking women to walk into an intimidating workshop, we created softer on-ramps: silver soldering, glass bead-making, glass fusing, sewing and embroidery, deliberately bridging into 3D printing, laser-cutting, CAD and coded electronics. We launched a new Facebook page and an intensive media campaign to lift the lid on what a hackspace actually is.

It worked, with twice as many women joining as the year before. Our textiles evening grew so popular it now runs across two nights, and women are designing in CAD, laser-cutting and 3D-printing their own components, sewing programmable LEDs into fabric, and firing silver clay into finished jewellery. One of them, aircraft technician Josie Such, who joined in 2025, launched her own fabrication business from the space, laser-cutting parts here for a skeeball table now enjoyed by tens of thousands of Southend visitors, and with our encouragement is now pursuing a career in media with Channel 4.

Membership passed 366. Around 20 volunteers gave over 2,450 hours. We ran six repair cafés, took STEM out to fetes and youth clubs, and host U3A, REMAP and Men's Sheds for free, all self-sufficiently, on annual running costs of roughly £8,000.