 |
|
 |
 |
This is a press release from the European Commission
Ceci est un communiqué de presse de la Commission Européenne
Statement by Viviane Reding,
EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media:
"Women Wanted in Europe's IT Industry!"
This Saturday, on 8 March, we are celebrating International Women's Day in Europe and around the world.
I have never been particularly fond of these special days. As a woman, I believe that there only will be full equality if we will have no longer a Women's Day.
I also see that these days are mostly for Sunday speeches, and are rarely followed by concrete action.
As Europe's IT Commissioner, I however see that we can make a very important and powerful contribution to equality: by bringing more women into IT jobs. This something that the industry and politics can get done together.
Bringing more women into the IT industry will not only be good for equality. It will at the same time help innovation, growth and the competitiveness of Europe.
Let me give you some figures:
- Europe is having trouble keeping up with market demands for qualified ICT staff. It is expected that there will be a shortage of 300,000 qualified staff by 2010. Several ICT companies are repeatedly reporting a skills gap, meaning they cannot find the people with the right education and training needed for their companies to improve and grow.
- The percentage of women graduates in all subjects grew from 55% in 1998 to 58% in 2004. However, between 1998 and 2004, the share of female computer science graduates decreased on average by around 4%.
- Looking at engineering, even though the total number of graduates is rising and the share of female engineering graduates is growing, women still only accounted for 19% of the total number of graduates in this field in 2004.
We need to act and act soon!
For me there is one obvious solution: to solve the shortfall of ICT professionals, we need to bring in more women who are currently under-represented in this dynamic sector. We need to use this untapped potential!
First of all, we need to convince young women, pupils, students, to prepare for a job in the IT sector, and not to leave this entirely to their male colleagues.
We need to show that IT jobs are not for geeky, unsociable persons, but that ICT is interesting, is mainstream, is part of everyone's daily life, and that ICT career is a choice for a creative person.
This is why the European Commission, together with companies from the IT sector, is organizing since 2006 a so-called "Shadowing Day", which we repeated this year for the second time.
On a shadowing day a young girl "shadows" a female engineer for a day as she goes around her daily duties. The girl can thus see all the facets of working in the sector. In 2007, more than 50 girls across Europe, aged between 10 and 20 years old, shadowed female engineers and researchers in leading ICT organizations and got an insight of what ICT is all about. I myself was shadowed by two young girls from Portugal at the Nanotechnologies conference in Braga last November. I am happy to see that the Commission's initiative was also taken up in the United States where 16 shadowing events were organized last year.
I highly recommend to you the video we produced on the 2007 Shadowing Day, which you will find on the Commission's website http://ec.europa.eu/itgirls. Please show it to your daughters and to their friends. It shows that IT jobs can be very sexy indeed!
I am very glad that yesterday evening, during a dinner with industry representatives from important IT companies from all around Europe, an agreement was found on launching another very concrete initiative: The industry, with the help of the European Commission, will prepare, within a year, a "European Code of Best Practice for Women in ICT" to encourage women to go into IT jobs.
Ladies and gentlemen, we need to overcome common stereotypes which describe ICT careers as boring and too technical for women.
We must instead encourage women to succeed in this exciting, innovative and multi-facetted sector. Women will benefit from this. And Europe as a whole will benefit from this. Because more female engineers and computer specialists will help us to reduce rapidly the skills gap that Europe's IT industry is currently facing.
How were the participant companies and IT institutes in the Shadowing Day 2007 chosen? They were not chosen, but there was an open invitation from the European Commission to participate. We spread the invitation as widely as possible with direct emails and contacts. The initiative was presented in conferences across the world. Information was sent for publication in relevant Newsletters, it was sent to multipliers and women's networks and was also put up on the website.
List of participant companies and IT institutes in the 2007 "Shadowing initiative"
- Athens Information Technology — AIT
- Consorzio per il Centro di Biomedicina Molecolare Scarl — CBM
- European Organization for Nuclear Research — CERN
- Fraunhofer Institute
- Fujitsu
- FUTURtec
- HOLOGRAFICA
- IKERLAN
- IMT
- INRIA
- INTRACOM
- Joint Research Centre — JRC
- L’OREAL
- MOTOROLA
- NOKIA
- Portugal Telecom
- Thales Alenia Space
- University of Southampton
How were the girls chosen? Companies were free to choose the girls themselves. They were usually girls from the local schools.
How were the girls invited to come to Brussels? It was not possible to invite all the girls to come so we drew lots. The lucky ones are here today. In some cases, the girls were not able to come as they had tests or exams.
What do you expect to achieve with the shadowing initiative? The Commission believes that shadowing will help to overcome the negative stereotype associated with ICT: the geeky, unsociable person. Young people will be able to see that ICT is interesting, is mainstream and is part of everyone's daily life, and that ICT career is a choice for a creative person.
How is the Code of Best Practices going to work? We are setting up a small industry group which will work on the ideas coming out of the workshops and will also collect all existing best practices in the sector. This will be formulated in such a way as to form a code of "behaviour" in the sector. The organizations which would like to implement it could adapt some or all of the practices in their daily work.
What is the role of the Commission in this Code? The Commission will act as facilitator. This code should be set up by the industry by next year, it should be implemented voluntarily. For such a code to succeed an organization needs to be committed to bring about some changes. These changes should create a good working environment and attract qualified staff, so it makes sense for organizations to commit to it.
What is the timeframe for the code to be implemented? Initially, the code needs to be prepared. The Commission is hopeful that it should be ready by late autumn this year and we shall start disseminating it at the beginning of 2009.
How are the results of the shadowing going to be evaluated? This is a long term project. We are planning to check the career paths of the participant girls. The girls need to go to university before we assess the impact. We are keeping in touch with last year's girls to have some idea how things are progressing. The hits on the website and the feedback we get are also another way to measure impact.
Official information of the European Commission is available at any time at
http://europa.eu/rapid/
Les informations officielles de la Commission européenne sont accessibles à
tout moment surhttp://europa.eu/rapid/
National Engineers Week
Headquarters
1420 King Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
(703) 684-2852
eweek@nspe.org