International Women in Engineering Day spotlight: Carine Bournez, W3C

23 June is International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) and celebrates the outstanding achievements of women engineers around the world while also noting that they are still hugely under-represented. As of 2026, it is estimated that 26.7% of the tech workforce globally are women. Last week we released our annual diversity report. We noted that as over 70% of the world is now online and more people continue to access and use the web we develop standards for, the diversity of the whole world needs to be reflected.

In the spirit of International Women in Engineering Day and in celebration of the achievements of women who have helped to make the web, we wanted to highlight W3C’s Carine Bournez whose role is instrumental in bringing to fruition web standards that form the building blocks of the modern web and that connect and empower humanity. She is a Principal and Team Contact who specializes in WebRTC, Web Performance, SVG and Data Shapes and has been deeply involved in web technology and web standards for many years.

Carine joined the W3C team in 2001. She holds an engineering degree and a PhD in Computer Science with a research area in distributed artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems.

Interview with Carine Bournez

Can you tell us a bit of your background and what drew you to engineering?

In high school I was interested in science (in particular chemistry) and also foreign languages. I chose an engineering school with a “European” section (a class with ⅔ of foreign European students, and additional possibility of learning a new language).

What drew you to the web and W3C?