With the growing prevalence of ICT technologies in our everyday life, the digital gender divide is becoming an ever more pertinent issue. This report focuses on one of the key dimensions of the digital gender gap – the ability of women to access the large and growing pool of ICT specialists’ jobs. Currently in Europe less than one in five ICT specialist job is occupied by a woman. As this report is showing, if the current trends will continue, only very marginal change can be expected over the coming years.
Part of the challenge, as is revealed in the report, is that the ICT education faces equally large, if not even more pronounced gender gap. In addition, given the fact that education systems take years to change and the effect of those changes may only appear a decade later, more rapid solutions are absolutely necessary to make change happen sooner. The report also reveals a very active ecosystem of grassroots initiatives across the Nordic-Baltic region, which, if mobilized and scaled-up, could very well make such more rapid change possible.
