Wishful thinking

Gillian Keating, the brains behind the I Wish initiative, wants secondary schoolgirls to broaden their career horizons into the tech sphere and gravitate toward Stem subjects

Gillian Keating: ‘If we don’t get on top of this, we’ll be turning the clock back by decades’ Picture: Clare Keogh

When Gillian Keating began her stint as president of Cork Chamber of Commerce five years ago, she was expecting it to be a year of discovery – a “great opportunity to lift my head out of my own desk and look around me”, as she puts it.

What she didn’t expect was to end up co-founding a hugely successful initiative designed to encourage girls in secondary school to study Stem subjects, and to ...