Our Mission
Women4IT is a multi-stakeholder partnership funded by the EEA Grants and the Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment. The project is supported by 9 Partners from across Europe and various sectors. The project will be implemented in 7 countries: Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania and Spain and supported by two expert partners: The European Centre for Women and Technology and DIGITALEUROPE.
In the context of the structural transformation towards a digital economy, there are significantly fewer women than men on the European market. Left unaddressed, this digital gap will lead to loosing-out on the female talent, innovation and entrepreneurship – and further widen the gender gap.
The ambition of the project partners is to develop the digital competences of young women who are at risk of exclusion from the labour market, by improving their employability.
Women4IT aims at raising awareness about digital skills and the gender gap, and at promoting concrete, innovative partnerships and solutions to increase the numbers of EU vulnerable girls and young women into the digital agenda.
Together, we want to assist one thousand young women to take successful steps into digital job-related employment. This is crucial for the European industry to remain competitive in the face of rapid advances by its competitors, and for the European society to remain inclusive in the digital age.
Our Objectives
The initiative will pursue its goals through awareness-raising campaigns about the digital skills and gender gap, skills assessment, innovative partnerships with employers, development of a new on-line employability profiling tool, training and employment guidance into Digital Jobs.
We plan to develop helpful, concrete actions and approaches such as through an online employability profiling tool and a learning/training platform that will include employer co-designed customized learning plan and a job application & on-boarding support system.
We are driven by these goals:
- To create attractive employment opportunities for young people in the digital economy;
- To provide access to an online employability profiling tool for individual testing;
- To ensure free and available digital training and opportunity so as to help individuals access a community of leading European digital workforce;
- To promote IT jobs for women as a source of economic growth and role models.
Our Activities
To ensure we achieve the Project Goals, dissemination activities will start together with the Project, with the main objective of achieving quickly a continuous flow of information concerning the project, its purposes and intermediate outcomes, and creating as much resonance as possible along the project life-span. Specifically, dissemination activities will be aimed to:
- Raise awareness of the necessity, benefits, strategies and best practices advancing new innovative solutions for young women´s employment through ICT;
- Create understanding among stakeholders and the general public to engage to support more people´s (specifically women´s) employment through ICT;
- Disseminate project results and findings: employability and profiling tool, and learning plan; materials (such as online flyers and video); and information about events among external and internal stakeholders;
- Engage effectively with stakeholders: mobilise relevant stakeholders and create a strong community advocating for young women´s employment in the ICT sector;
- Prepare for further broad European level actions and exploitation of project results: reinforce partners’ engagement and expand the outreach to new stakeholders;
- Ensure visibility of the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment;
- Strengthen the brand of the project ensuring visual and messaging unity;
- Facilitate the exchange of best practices
The Project Timeline
Project Nr. 2017-1-094 ‘Women4IT’ will run between September 2018 and January 2023. We plan for extensive dissemination through a series of events such as conferences and workshops. This initiative will focus over the next three years on broader community awareness of the importance of inclusion in the labour market, conclude innovative partnerships with employers, develop and make available to those interested a set of online tools for profiling, competence testing, training and placement of candidates on the labour market.
