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Women Choosing ICT Careers: Influencing Policy from Practice-CONFERENCE RESULTS, Athens Greece
See attachment: ConferenceResultsProposalsActionPLan.pdf
Strategies for Closing Three Major Gender Gaps:
(1) Participation/Engagement Gap
(2) Pay Gap
(3) Advancement/ Leadership Gap
The high-performing businesses of tomorrow that embrace diversity - the influx of new perspectives and new skills to eliminate the skills shortage - and the infinite potential of women and turn it into a competitive advantage will be successful in the new global markets. The establishment of an attractive open labour market that recruits and retains women is essential. According to the European Commission’s Women and ICT status report (2010), today on a global level, there is a shortage of 1.2 million jobs in the ICT sector due to the absence of skilled labor. In Europe this figure is estimated to be 300.000. Consequently, recruiting and recognizing the largely untapped pool of talent amongst women, getting more girls and women into the science and technology sector is not only a gender equality issue but it is an economic necessity. Many findings support the business case for diversity, according to which companies that recruit, retain, and advance women (into leadership positions) have a greater competitive advantage and achieve better business results. (Kamberidou 2010)
Encouraging more women and girls to take up ICT, retaining them in the sector and reproducing female participation requires working together to support an “Education-Engagement-Retention Action Plan” (Kamberidou 2008) that entails: (1) Support of multicultural interdisciplinary gender research networks and collaborative actions that address the three major gender gaps:(a) the gender participation/engagement gap, (b) the pay gap and the (c) advancement-leadership gap. (2) Support of multicultural interdisciplinary gender research to influences mainstream developments in science and technology from a gender perspective, including a better balance of gendered content to change attitudes, perceptions and stereotypes. (3) Interdisciplinarity in education and research in order to formulate new pedagogical methods and approaches that incorporate the gender dimension. Education-training and engagement for teachers and children means extra-curricula approaches, new classroom examples and best practice models. (3) Educating the educators, re-training the trainers: learning, continued training and re-training. (4) Participation in areas of planning, management, assessment and organization. (5) Family support programmes, flexi-hours, a family-friendly working environment, child care facilities, namely an inclusive work culture. (6) The establishment of an attractive open labour market that recruits and retains women. (7) Gender networking, alliances with women, sharing, mentoring and supporting younger female colleagues in order to eliminate “gender fatigue” (Kamberidou 2010) and encourage women to take a more active role (agency), to keep up with developments, to share information, etc. (8) Social mobility in the structure, i.e. learning the system and how to use it in order to make changes. (9) Best-practice models and mentoring projects: the involvement of professional women (Leaders) already employed in science and technology, the academia, research sectors. (10) Raising the profile of our role models and female leaders as well as the diversity of careers available. We need to inspire women into technology with innovative and different approaches such as the European Commission’s shadowing activities (http://ec.europa.eu/itgirls, mentoring programs and so forth. We need to all join forces and work together to accomplish this. For example, the ECWT (www.womenandtechnology.eu) and the EUD www.ictwomendirectory.eu) provide such a platform for collaborations.
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