 We're here at the ITU Planet Potentiary Conference 2014 in Busan in the Republic of Korea and I'm very pleased to be joined by Ambassador Pamela Hammamotto, who is U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva. Ambassador Hammamotto, thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you for having me. Now this morning the ITU launched the GemTech Awards, recognizing outstanding achievement of organizations and individuals in the areas of gender equality and mainstreaming through ICTs. Do you think it's important to encourage innovators in the field? Absolutely. Awards like the GemTech Awards are so important because it gives the opportunity for some of these women, young women entrepreneurs, young girls to really showcase the work that they're doing. There's so much that needs to be developed and encouraged around the world in this sector because girls and women are still significantly underrepresented and there's really no better way to empower women and to give them the ability to participate fully in society if they don't have training in and access to ICTs. So being able to put the spotlight on some of these programs to provide support and encouragement is really, really important. Now you've personally had experience being a woman in the technology sector. What would you tell young women about the field? Well, I have a background in engineering and as a young girl I actually was always very interested in math and science in more analytical courses and so when I went to college it was kind of a natural fit for me to pursue an engineering degree and it was difficult at times because back then, this was a long time ago, but back then there were only six percent of engineers in the U.S. were women. So it was a very male dominated field in school and out in the workforce. So there were times that it was challenging to kind of stick with it but I knew it was important because I felt like the engineering degree and being in a technical field would give me very good critical thinking skills, a good framework for approaching and solving complex problems and that those skills would then provide a great foundation to build upon as I progress through my career because they're very transferable skills and in fact it's proved to be true. So my first job out of college, I actually was working in the clean energy sector in hydroelectric energy and I did a lot of computer programming so directly using the skills that I learned through my engineering program at Stanford and I was developing computer models that were meant to optimize the amount of hydroelectric energy that we could get from the river systems, very complex river systems in Northern California and then that parlayed into a job actually in the telecommunication sector which was a little bit different but it was a way to use the same skills and sort of build on the experience that I'd had in the clean energy sector and it was basically analyzing new products and figuring out the best way to get them introduced into new markets. So slightly different focuses but again transferable skills that were very valuable and then you know I took that and actually decided to go back to school, I went to business school and the skills again I was able to apply to analyzing financial statements and business opportunities. So as I sort of progressed through my career I've taken a lot of sort of twists and turns along the way but I found that it was really really valuable to have that foundation in the sciences and in STEM education. And finally what else do you think could be done to encourage more women and girls to embrace technology? Well there's so much more that needs to be done because even though we've come a little bit made some improvements toward increasing the participation of girls in the STEM fields and young women, we have such a long way to go. One of the ways we're addressing that in Geneva, we have a new program through our U.S. mission that we're rolling out, it's an initiative that broadly focuses on protecting and empowering women and children but one of the three pillars is around the economic empowerment of women and ICTs play a critical role in that part of the effort. So I'm going to be partnering with a lot of my counterparts in Geneva, we're going to be working with a lot of the NGOs that are based there and a lot of the international organizations to really approach this gender problem from a lot of different angles and to really keep the focus on support these programs, support girls and women to see if we can increase their participation. And our initiative dovetails nicely with a lot of the programs that the U.S. is supporting. This is obviously a very critical priority for the administration and a couple I just wanted to mention in particular, there's a program called Tech Women which is a State Department program that's focused on connecting the next generation of leaders in science, technology, engineering and math from Africa and the Middle East with leaders in the United States and they're providing mentorship and exchange opportunities and it's really a great opportunity to build a really strong network that's very valuable for these young entrepreneurs from other countries and there's another program that's actually a USAID program called Let Girls Learn and it's focused on addressing the problem of 62 million girls that are not in school around the world. And so USAID has committed $230 million to this program as a way to support primary and secondary education for girls, for underrepresented minorities and for low income children. Ambassador Hamamoto, thank you very much and you've been with us today. Oh thank you very much for having me.