In Budapest searching for Europe’s cyberellas
And how the EGI Gender Action Plan is making us proud
Most of my colleagues at EGI.eu have computer science degrees. We are hosted by the High Energy Physics institute and neighbours of SARA, the Dutch centre for high-performance computing and networking. From where I stand, IT specialists are not hard to find. But today I just learned that there is an almost chronic lack of qualified engineers and IT experts in Europe.
I’m at the Women in Science, Innovation and Technology meeting in Budapest, a joint high-level conference organized by the Hungarian EU presidency and the European Commission’s DG INFSO. It’s estimated that by 2015, Europe will be short of 400,000 e-professionals to fulfill all its needs. I don’t know what you make of this number – to me it sounds a lot.
Europe needs to find them somewhere. There is a continuous effort to attract bright students to take STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) at university, but the goal will be easier to reach if more girls and women are encouraged to become IT and engineering professionals.
The conference, held at the gorgeous Hungarian Academy of Sciences building next to the Danube, addresses precisely this issue. Less than one in five computer scientists in the European Union are women. “Europe needs more ‘cyberellas’,” argues the European Centre for Women and Technology (ECWT). According to this think tank, “getting more girls and women into the IT sector is not just a gender equality issue – it’s an economic necessity as well."
The discussions at the event are focusing on how to measurably increase female presence across the STEM area in research & innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership roles.
The backdrop of the event is the ECWT position paper on Gender and Technologies, outlining the Gender Action Plan for the Digital Agenda. The document presents a general overview of the issue of women in Science and Technology, the major outcomes of previous programmes and a set of policy recommendations.
One of these recommendations is a call for data on gender: “without data there is no visibility, without visibility there is no priority.” This is where EGI can help. The EGI Gender Action Plan will collect as much information as possible on women participation in the distributed computing field and will raise awareness of the gender issues highlighted here in Budapest.
I was also very proud to discover that EGI is being cited as a role model in this area. The ECWT position paper lists EGI as one of the “most active actors in promoting European girls and women’s advancement.” And I was also very pleased to see the story Erika Swiderski wrote for our newsletter on the EGI Gender Action Plan quoted amongst the paper’s references.
