Alexia Hilbertidou

Alexia Hilbertidou is a New Zealand social entrepreneur and the founder of GirlBoss New Zealand, a social enterprise that aims to help young women in leadership, entrepreneurship and STEM.

Hilbertidou founded GirlBoss at 16, inspired by being the only girl in her Year 12 IT and physics class at Albany Senior High School in Auckland. What started as a response to a classroom imbalance has grown into New Zealand’s largest network for young women, with 17,500 members, roughly one in seven of all high-school-aged young women in the country. GirlBoss delivers workshops for high school students, featuring speakers from business, technology and public life.

Beyond GirlBoss, Hilbertidou’s trajectory has been unusual by any standard. In 2017, she was invited by NASA to join the SOFIA Project, riding aboard a 747 jumbo jet during an overnight astronomical research mission, becoming the youngest person ever to take part. She has since served as New Zealand’s Gender Equality Ambassador at the World Expo, a Facebook Leadership Fellow, a VIP Scientific Communicator for NASA and a National Geographic Explorer.

The recognition runs deep: Forbes 30 Under 30, the Princess Diana Award, Pacific Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Most Influential NZ Woman Under 25 at the Westpac Women of Influence Awards and more than 30 awards in total. She also won the Unitec Coding App competition in 2015 for KaiShare, an online food distribution platform and interned at the New Zealand Treasury.

Hilbertidou’s profile is noteworthy because she built New Zealand’s largest youth network for women before she could vote and has since turned that early conviction into a international platform. Proof that the country can produce founders who lead from purpose as much as from product.

Sources: Wikipedia · Alexia.nz · RNZ