Scholar wins women in business advocate award

Julie Pham has won the Female Founders Association's Advocate Awards at its 2019 Champion Awards.

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has won a prestigious advocacy award for her outstanding work promoting women in business.

Julie Pham, PhD won the Advocate Award at the Female Founders Association's Champion Awards 2019.

The Female Founders Alliance is a start-up community dedicated to accelerating highly scaleable female-founded start-ups. It has hundreds of companies in its founders network, thousands of individuals in its extended community and plans to go global in 2019.

The Advocate Award was voted for by women and non-binary people in an open community voting system.

Julie [2001], who did her PhD in Historical Studies at the University of Cambridge and was part of the first Gates cohort, heads community engagement and the Ion Program at Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). 

There she has instituted a policy of including women as speakers at all WTIA events, created a public speakers’ bureau to make it easier to source diverse speakers, spearheaded the “Tech Diversity Champions” resource guide and made diversity a priority at the annual WTIA FullConTech conference. 

She has also co-organised the “Diversity and Inclusion Track” for Seattle Start-up Week and for Spring Forward with Women Leaders. 

In addition to this latest award Julie was named a “Woman of Courage” by Women's Center at the University of Washington and “Woman of Power” by Northwest Asian Weekly.