Supporting women and those from lower-income families into careers in STEM and Tech
Article 1 is one of France’s leading social mobility organisations, supporting nearly 100,000 young people from low-income families every year. The Hg Foundation’s €800,000 grant is enabling Article 1 to launch and deliver the DEMA1N+STEM programme, which showcases STEM and tech pathways to female students from priority low-income backgrounds. The core of DEMA1N+STEM is mentoring. Mentees are matched with professional mentors and the programme complements this one-to-one mentoring with peer networking and community-building activities. Students get access to workshops, webinars, job discovery evenings and company visits, mentoring, and tech-career specific resources.
The programme is delivered nationally across France, with online elements and in-person activities regionally. Ultimately the aims are to support students to graduate university with STEM degrees; secure STEM internships; and secure STEM jobs after graduating.
In 2025, Article 1 commissioned EVAL-LAB, an independent French evaluation organisation, to pilot a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT). The pilot showed that an RCT was not yet feasible, but through qualitative work and surveys, EVAL-LAB generated valuable insights into the profile of Article 1’s mentees, their motivations and aspirations, and how mentoring is working in practice. Article 1 and EVAL-LAB are using this learning to refocus their joint work on further developing Article 1's theory of change, programme engagement, and monitoring systems before revisiting impact evaluation in the future.
Drawing on the pilot's findings and an evidence review on good practice in mentoring, EVAL-LAB has set out a series of recommendations to strengthen both the programme and internal data collection that Article 1, with EVAL-LAB 's support, is now taking forward. These cover different approaches to the matching process between mentors and mentees, the support and training provided to mentors, the role of collective activities and peer networks, and the systematic analysis of Article 1's monitoring data to better understand who engages with the programme and how.
“This is a key project for the association as it strives to offer high-quality initiatives tailored to the needs of young people, during a period of stabilisation after the programme scale-up. With the support of Hg, we are proposing specific initiatives that will give young people access to high-potential jobs of the future.”
