U-RISE — Dr Anna Szlavi

Following Equality Across Borders, Disciplines, and Technology

By Fawzia “Fuzzy” Kara-Isitt

Dr Anna Szlavi, Gender in STEM Expert, DEI Specialist, Educational Content Creator.

“I never planned to work in technology.” — Dr Anna Szlavi

It may be surprising to hear those words from one of Europe’s strongest advocates for gender equality in computing, one who helps build international communities, leads European initiatives, mentors and champions women and non-binary people in technology and across STEM. Yet for Anna Szlavi, technology was never the destination. Equality was.

Like many U-RISE journeys, hers began with curiosity rather than certainty, and with inner battles and questions that became impossible to ignore. Long before her current success across Europe, Anna had imagined a different future. Growing up in Hungary, her interests laid firmly in social sciences. She wanted to understand people, society, power, and gender; questions that mattered deeply to her long before they became her life’s work. Gender equality became a pressing need to her. “As a woman growing up in Hungary,” she reflects, “my dominant experience was that I always had to do more and be more to receive the same appreciation as my male family members and peers.” Those early experiences quietly planted a question that would follow her throughout her career. Why were duties and opportunities unequal? Why did women continually have to prove themselves before being trusted? Those questions led her to seek understanding of linguistics and culture’s role in human interactions, and in turn, towards gender studies, where she found her calling and the field she would dedicate her career to.

Finding Equality in an Unexpected Place

However, then history intervened. Around the time Anna was completing her PhD, gender studies became heavily politicised in Hungary and was ultimately removed from universities. Suddenly, the academic path she had chosen no longer existed. Many would have accepted defeat. Anna did the opposite. Rather than conforming, Anna became interested in a different question. What if we stopped asking women to adapt to the system, and instead asked how the system itself could become more inclusive?

“What if we stopped asking women to adapt to the system, and instead asked how the system itself could become more inclusive?” — Dr Anna Szlavi.

That question has shaped much of her work ever since. Instead of abandoning the work she believed in, she chose the far harder road. To find those answers, and to establish the foundation of gender equality, Anna left her home country and her chosen discipline to fight for opportunities beyond geographical (and disciplinary) borders. It was definitely not an easy choice, to leave her family and culture behind, but it allowed her to remain true to her beliefs, values, and questions that mattered most to her core warrior spirit. “It made my path much tougher,” she says, “but it also gave me a unique perspective and allowed me to achieve so much more than I might have if I had stayed.” Looking back now, it becomes clear that what first appeared to be a setback became the very event that shaped everything that followed. While she left gender studies behind, she never left behind the reason she entered it. She simply found a new way to express itself now, to continue her vision. That new way was through technology.

The unconventional route that led Anna to live her dream, also helped her to continue her research in accessibility and gender bias to educate others, and guide the next generation to appreciate and learn about equality through STEM. Anna has designed an visionary curriculum for project-based courses that explore gender inclusion, diversity, and innovation in STEM education and engineering through students lived experience projects, which allows them to conduct collaborative research whilst learning about gender bias in practice. It has put a real desire in me to attend her sessions as well and to be coached by her to pass it on. I highly recommend a visit to https://impactinstem.com.

The Power of Being Seen

Instead of asking how more women could fit into technology, Anna began asking how could technology itself become more inclusive? That shift would shape the rest of her career. Today, through initiatives including EUGAIN (European Network for Gender Balance in Informatics), Women STEM UP, IMPACT in STEM, and her leadership within ACM-W Europe, Anna works across countries and disciplines to build stronger, more inclusive research communities where women are supported not only to enter computing but also to remain, thrive, and lead within it. Her work has always been about belonging. Throughout our conversation, it became increasingly clear that what motivates Anna is creating environments where people genuinely feel they have a place. She knows from experience that talent alone is rarely enough and that, sometimes, people need someone to believe in them before they believe in themselves.

When speaking about her own journey, Anna returns again and again to two women who gently changed her life; Professor Anna Einarsdóttir and Professor Letizia Jaccheri. They offered encouragement, and, more importantly, trust. “They saw the talent in me before I believed it myself,” she says. “They gave me leadership opportunities before I thought I had proved myself.” That early confidence transformed the way she saw herself. Looking back, Anna believes those moments of “advanced trust” became some of the most important turning points in her career, as they changed her perspective on what she believed was possible. Today, she strives to offer that same belief to younger women entering STEM. She passes the ‘advanced trust’ along, because sometimes confidence grows only after someone opens the first door. In our chat, Anna did not talk about “fixing women”, however, but about improving systems. Too often conversations around gender imply that women need more confidence, more resilience, more skills. Anna sees it differently. Confidence grows when people feel they belong. Belonging grows when communities intentionally create space. Mentoring, role models and visible pathways matter.

Sometimes all it takes is seeing someone whose journey looks familiar to them, before believing that one’s own place is also possible in that journey, such as, in technology. Perhaps that is why so much of Anna’s work focuses on mentoring and building communities where those connections can happen naturally.

More than Technology

Although Anna now works in computing, she does not see technology as the answer to society’s problems. For her, it is people who make the difference. Technology simply creates another space in which those problems can either be challenged or reinforced. This is why she encourages women from humanities, arts and social science backgrounds not to underestimate what they can bring to computing. Technical knowledge can be learned, she argues, but human understanding is much harder to teach. “We need those humanistic perspectives,” she explains. “Those societal values are exactly what technology needs.”

Computing, in her view, needs people who understand ethics, education, psychology, communication, history, philosophy, design, languages and society. Bringing those perspectives together can lead to better ideas and, ultimately, better technology. For Anna, inclusion is shaped by everyday decisions about how environments are designed and whose perspectives are welcomed. Diversity, including gender diversity, is therefore not simply a matter of fairness. It can also change what we are able to create.

The figure above is the blueprint of the interventions required towards greater diversity, equality and inclusion in both education and industry pathways in computer science (as envisioned by Anna Szlavi).

Redefining Strength

Despite everything she has achieved, Anna speaks remarkably openly about insecurity. She describes confidence not as something that appears overnight, but as something that develops gradually through having a sense of purpose.

When asked what advice she would give women entering technology, she does not begin with coding, careers or qualifications. She begins with motivation. “I would first ask them why they want to join the field. And to remind themselves of that reason on days it gets hard.” For Anna, that question matters because having a purpose can help carry us through rejection, uncertainty and self-doubt in ways that talent alone cannot. It is something she has experienced herself. Her career has had its setbacks, but she has continued because she has never lost sight of why she started.

“The clearer your motivation,” she reflects, “the easier it becomes to keep going.” Eventually, you look back and realise how far you have travelled. Perhaps it is then that the sense of belonging, which once seemed so difficult to find, begins to feel real.

Advice to the Next Generation and Looking Back

If there is one message running through Anna’s journey, it is that you do not have to look like everyone else to belong in computing, and you do not have to arrive with all the answers. What matters is finding your purpose and continuing to pursue it.

The things that make us feel different can sometimes become the things we contribute most strongly. If Anna could speak to the younger version of herself, the young woman beginning university in Hungary, she would offer a piece of Hungarian wisdom: “Pepper is small but strong.” It is a reminder that influence is not necessarily measured by size, status or certainty. Sometimes strength is simply the ability to keep going. Perhaps that same idea explains another quotation that has guided and inspired Anna throughout her life, both as a scholar and an activist, from John Donne’s For Whom the Bell Tolls:

“No man is an island… each is a piece of the continent
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee”

For Anna, inclusion has never been about helping one individual succeed in isolation. Our progress is connected to the progress of others. Communities matter. Mentors matter. Representation matters. Removing a barrier for one woman can make the path a little easier for the next.

When I finished speaking with Anna, what stayed with me was not simply the breadth of her career across countries, disciplines and international leadership. It was the fact that she has continued to ask the same question that motivated her in the first place: ‘How can we make things fairer for all genders?’

The places changed. The disciplines changed. The technologies changed. But the purpose remained.

Final Reflections

Some interviews leave you impressed. Others leave you hopeful. This one managed to do both.

I came away thinking that Anna’s greatest contribution goes beyond her research and even the communities she has helped build. It is also the reminder that lasting change rarely comes from one extraordinary breakthrough. More often, it grows through conversations, encouragement, mentoring, research, role models and opportunities that gradually change how people see themselves and what they believe is possible.

That is something U-RISE has been discovering all along. Sometimes what we can offer another woman is not a roadmap, but the confidence that there is already a place for her on the journey, and the encouragement to find her own purpose along the way. Keep walking your unconventional path, even when it takes you somewhere you did not expect. Sometimes the road you planned disappears and another one opens up, leading somewhere better than you imagined. Hold on to the reason you started. Let that purpose carry you through the difficult moments. Trust the mentors who believe in you, and remember the importance of extending that same support to someone else. The questions that stay with us can be important ones. They can lead us towards our purpose, towards the communities that help us grow, and towards the courage to make space for others. Every U-RISE begins with one person wondering, “what if?” And it grows each time that curiosity becomes an opportunity for someone else to belong.

Anna’s story reminds us that we do not need to know exactly where the journey will lead. We need to keep pursuing what matters.