When young girls start growing up, they often lose their confidence and curiosity and feel too afraid to fail. GirlBoss entrepreneur Alexia Hilbertidou and LEGO Group have teamed up to help girls think outside the box when it comes to picking a career path
Alexia Hilbertidou knows what might come to mind when we think of STEM entrepreneurs, but this is not the inclusive vision she wants Kiwi girls to have in their mind. And, at just age 25, she’s been working on changing this stereotype for almost a decade.
Yes, you did that maths right. She’s been out to change this perception for school-aged girls since she was one. At age 16, Alexia started her own business, GirlBoss New Zealand, which is a social enterprise aimed at empowering young women in leadership and entrepreneurship, with a heavy focus on STEM.
“It’s really gone beyond what I could have imagined when I was 16 at high school and the only girl in my tech class,” Alexia says. “To go from there as the only girl, feeling like this little loner, to now working with 1000s of young women every year… it’s beyond my wildest dreams.”
She cites the community around her for helping her turn a school-age pipe dream into a business so successful that she’s won multiple awards, including the Prime Minister’s Pacific Youth Award Winner, Pacific Young Entrepreneur of the Year, as well as being named one of Forbes 30 under 30.
None of that was on her mind at 16, she says. “I saw a problem – I saw that there was a lack of space and community for ambitious, young women who were also passionate about social justice,” Alexia says.
She started GirlBoss New Zealand in 2015, at a time when feminism was just starting to return to the mainstream conversation – Beyoncé was performing with the word ‘FEMINIST’ emblazoned behind her; ‘are you a feminist?’ was seen still seen as a provocative question. The fact that Alexia was young, smart and feminist – and that the term ‘Girlboss’ was only just hitting the zeitgeist – meant that the business “blew up immediately” she says.
Almost 10 years later, the path to gender equality may feel bumpier than ever, which is why Alexia says it’s still as important as ever for young women to know how to advocate for themselves and to support other women. Take it from someone at the coal face, however – things have improved.
“Back in the early days of trying to get sponsors, the conversations were still around such things as ‘Why is it good to have more women in leadership?’ and ‘why do we need more women in STEM?’” Alexia says drily. “I’d literally have to start my presentation with a piece about ‘now, here are the benefits of having women…’ So, the great news is that we have progressed on from that! Now, we can move on to making it happen.”
With her company GirlBoss New Zealand, Alexia is dedicated to helping young women see a future for themselves in STEM. And now, she’s teaming up with the LEGO Group to help mentor two students on how to run your own business – and think outside the box when it comes to laying out the first steps of a career path.
This comes off the bat of a research project the LEGO Group recently completed about confidence in young girls. They found that nearly three-quarters of parents felt that girls were under more pressure than boys to be perfect, and this was backed up by the girls themselves – 77% of girls aged 5-12 felt confident in their creativity, but that declines as they get older, with 76% worried about facing judgement from others on their creative ideas. As a result, The LEGO Group wanted to focus on helping girls embrace curiosity, not perfection.
This has long been a topic of interest for Alexia. “If young women are putting that idea of perfection in their heads, that idea that ‘I can’t fail, I have to be perfect’, it’s really limiting.” Coming from a tech background, Alexia says that failing is a huge part of something like coding, where trial and error on repeat is the only road to success.
“We really want to allow young women to be brave, and creative, and messy, and to be imperfect – to fail, and then get back up and try again. That’s the spirit we wanted to celebrate with this LEGO partnership, but they’re also just really good principles for life, as well.”
This idea of perfection is one that Alexia battled against herself. “I was quite a fearful child,” she says. Growing up with a single mother, Alexia had the hyper-vigilance that comes with knowing that money was tight. “The first place we lived, we shared a room and we had a curtain in the middle. We were there for a number of years, and I really remember in those moments my mum instilled in me – and this is really a strong Pasifika value – the belief that education was the tool to get out of poverty.”
As a result, she says, she was driven to succeed and threw herself into academics, only for the path between success and education to suddenly split when she started her own business while in high school. “When I had to take that step in going full time with GirlBoss, I had to be brave,” she says. “When I told my mum, at 16, that I wanted to start my very own organisation, her response was ‘Why don’t you go to university, get a normal job, and then you can just donate to charity?’”
“For people who have grown up in the poverty cycle, you want to take the safest, most reliable path,” Alexia says. “But there is so much reward and opportunity by taking a little of a risk, daring to be brave and starting your own initiative. I really try and drill that message into the young women we work with, that you’re never too young to create change.”
In Alexia’s case, she had just finished high school – she had a job offer from IBM waiting, and $83k in university scholarships lined up. It was a big, bold call to go her own way instead and choose GirlBoss – basically, choose her own potential – instead.
“The first year turnover was something like $15k, which does not go that far,” she says. “It was a decision to say, ‘I believe in this, I’m going to take this risk. And I’m actually going to do this not just for young women, but for myself, because I want to live life on my own terms and create success in a way I can define for myself.”
It’s also that idea of changing the narrative of what it means to start your own business, particularly in tech. Alexia says the current picture people have is very “Elon Musk,” the idea that “you have to hurt a lot of people on the way up, you have to be very competitive.”
Whereas the message that Alexia and the work of GirlBoss New Zealand is very much, as she says, from an abundance mindset. “We can all win, you don’t have to undermine your values and instead of looking at other people working in the gender equality space as competition, I look at them as collaborators,” she says.
“It’s so much better to be able to walk into any room and to know that you’ve lived with integrity, and that’s what I want all the girls we work with to realise. Because life is long, and there is no time to be bringing other people down.”
That’s why teaming up with LEGO NZ is a great way of walking that talk and teaching the next generation how to not only start a business they’re proud of, but do it in a way that’s aligned with their best values. The two girls that they’re mentoring are 12 years old – one of whom has already started her own business, and one of whom is already a leader in her school and community. They’re resilient, they’re creative and they’re ambitious, which are “exactly the values we are always looking to celebrate at GirlBoss,” Alexia says.
And not only does this mentoring work with the LEGO Group help put a spotlight on the work of these two young girls, it can hopefully help inspire their peers to think outside the box as well. “It’s encouraging more girls to create their own path and their own culture as well,” Alexia says.
As a member of Gen Z, Alexia has high hopes and high expectations for what her generation – and the next one – will achieve.
“I do feel Generation Z and Generation Alpha will be the ones to reach gender equality,” Alexia says. “They say it’s going to take 131 years for us to reach full gender equity, according to the World Economic Forum. Well, I’m Generation Z and our attention span is measured in seconds… not 131 years,” she laughs. “So, we need to put our foot on the pedal and make sure we are making it happen a lot quicker than that.”
