ConTech- woman of the year!

Real Estate & Building Futureproof - knowledge festival

Amsterdam 03-10-2022 - Almost 1000 leaders from the building & real estate sector came together during the first edition of the ‘Real Estate & Building Futureproof - knowledge festival’. During the festival, the REBF ConTech Awards ceremony took place, where Anke Rolvink won in the category ‘Futureproof Woman of the Year’. ​ “It is a great honour to receive this award. I know from experience that female role models are extremely important in our sector in particular. I hope that I can inspire and convince young girls and women to enter this male-dominated world. And then hopefully a separate ‘woman category’ will be a thing of the past!”, Rolvink said.

ConTech Awards

The ConTech Awards were given out to ‘Futureproof’ professionals, companies or also buildings that were an inspiration across the whole sector. Anke Rolvink is a tech entrepreneur with a long history in the construction sector. She studied Structural Mechanics at TU Delft with a focus on design software for the building industry. Anke: “I chose this sector because I love doing complicated things that no one else does. And luckily this discipline doesn’t recognise gender.” One of her most famous projects was the implementation of a parametric software that was used for the design of Arnhem Central Station and the Expo Shanghai in 2010.

White Lioness technologies

In 2013 Anke Rolvink, and Jeroen Coenders, started White Lioness technologies. The company helps construction companies to digitalise their knowledge and processes to increase efficiency. “For more than 9 years we have worked with the most innovative, future-proof tools to help companies digitise their logic and engineering processes to reusable algorithms”, says Rolvink. But that’s not the only pro of White Lioness technologies. Since the company was founded, there has been a heavy focus on inclusivity, which led to a balanced mix of women and men in the team. Rolvink: “We have consciously aimed to keep a balance of women/ men in the team, but there are still too few women in the construction sector: in 2021 there were only 10.9%. I’m very proud of the fact that our solutions were created for construction companies by such an inclusive team.”

The REBF festival examined the challenges of the future. Sustainability, energy transition, the transition of materials and a shortage of competent labour: major challenges that the construction and real estate sector is rapidly addressing. Current global developments, inflation, commodity prices and construction prices are further accelerating those discussions.