News GirlBoss 2026: Great, but you'll learn 22/09/26 It’s what adults say to young people with big ideas. Our two winners at the 2026 GirlBoss Awards, and why an electricity infrastructure company sponsors awards for teenage girls. When Aisha Mitha’s name was read out at The Northern Club in Auckland on 16 September, she had already done the hard part on her own. The 16-year-old won the STEM award at the 2026 GirlBoss Awards, the national category Connetics sponsors alongside Orion, for an app she built, rebuilt, and tested herself after a resident at the retirement home where she volunteers became distressed and Aisha was told nothing could be done about it. A fortnight earlier in Christchurch, our Trailblazer award had gone to Seyara De Silva, 17, Head Girl at Marian College. Neither of them waited for an adult to tell them their idea was any good. What they'd already done Canterbury came first, at the Christchurch Town Hall on Tuesday 1 September. Connetics and Orion are joint naming sponsors of the Canterbury awards and we sponsor the Trailblazer category, which went to Seyara, pictured to the right. Her year reads like a much longer career. She has raised more than $12,000 for Caritas, collected over 700 cans for St Vincent de Paul, supported SHE Women’s Refuge, and raised $700 for St Leo’s School in Kiribati. She volunteers every week at Nurse Maude, where one resident thought enough of her to put a photo of the two of them up on her wall. As Head Girl she set Marian College a theme for 2026, “do not be afraid”, and spent the year saying it to everyone else before anyone thought to ask whether she meant it about herself. The national awards followed in Auckland on 16 September, where 647 young women applied across eight categories, and our STEM category went to Aisha. She had met a resident with dementia who was distressed, asked what could be done, and was told it was normal and there was nothing anyone could do. She went and read everything she could find, learned the condition is projected to become about 50% more common, and built an app to help with memory, sleep, and diet. The platform she built it on wouldn’t publish at the scale she wanted, so she started over and built a second one. Ten residents at the home trialled it. One kept replaying the memory game and watched her own score climb on the graph. The home’s volunteer coordinator got behind it, then the chief executive, and they’re working through the practical side with her now. Nobody asked her for a business case before they said yes. Pictured right: Girlboss Canterbury Awards 2026 Trailblazer Winner Seyara De Silva What we get out of it Fewer than one in ten technical roles in New Zealand’s electricity supply industry are held by women. An awards sponsorship doesn’t change that on its own, and we’re not going to pretend it does. What it does do though, is put us in a room we’d never otherwise be in, listening to people we’d never otherwise meet. The room is an education. Adults usually have a stock response to a young person with a big idea. It’s kind, and it comes to something like “great, but you’ll learn”. Aisha got a version of it from someone with every reason to be right, in a home where the answer really was that nothing could be done. She went and did it anyway, and the thing she built now has real-world evidence behind it and a chief executive working out how to run it. Every organisation has a version of “that’s normal, there’s nothing you can do”, and ours is no exception. What separates an idea from a thing that exists is usually a budget, a contract, and someone senior enough to make an organisation change how it works. None of that belongs on a 16-year-old. It happens to be what a company our size does all day. So the blunt version of why we sponsor Trailblazer and STEM is that our industry needs young women like Aisha and Seyara considerably more than they need us. They’ll get on with it either way. It’s a great way to remind us that we need to be one of the people who helps than one of the people who explains why it won’t work. “I read a lot of these applications. You go in thinking you’re looking for potential and pretty quickly you work out that’s the wrong thing to be looking for. They’re not waiting for someone to give them a go. They’re already making waves.” – Natasha Smith, Connetics, national STEM judge Where this sits The awards night is the glitzy, dress-up part. The more useful part is what happens around it. With Orion we sponsor GirlBoss Edge: Sustainability, which puts young women through a real project with mentors working alongside them, some of them ours. We host Connexis’ Girls with Hi-Vis at our Canterbury depot, where students spend the day on the same gear our crews use. We take on apprentices every year, which is the same idea over a longer run. The pattern is the same each time. Hand over something real, then be useful when the practical part arrives. Most of the young wāhine at these two nights won’t end up in our industry. But if they do, they’ll turn up already knowing how to start something without being told first that it’s possible. We could not have taught them that part. Ngā mihi to Orion for backing both awards alongside us, and to Alexia Hilbertidou and the GirlBoss NZ team for two nights we won’t forget. See yourself in this work? We’re always after good people, from apprentices learning the trade to engineers designing the network. Take a look at where you could fit. Pictured left: National GirlBoss 2026 STEM Winner Aisha Mitha Winner presented her award by Connetics’ Natasha Smith Connetics Careers
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