ICT is the fastest growing sector in Europe and beyond. There is a growing gap between the demand and supply for ICT specialists, estimated at 756,000 by 2020 (Digital skills in the EU labour market, EP, 2017). At the same time, women are overwhelmingly under-represented in this sector due to a number of multi-faced social, economic, and cultural obstacles and biases. When they do choose ICT, they face a higher risk of dropping out because of unfavourable working conditions and lack of career perspective. The WITECH project sets out to make technology curricula at Higher Education level more diversified and more attractive for girls and women by producing a course on technology entrepreneurship for female students of master’s degree programmes in ICT. The course will be jointly designed by 7 partners from 4 countries: the French business school IPAG and three pairs of technological universities and tech hubs from Italy (the coordinator Politecnico di Milano and PoliHub), Finland (Lappeenranta University of Technology and The Shortcut) and Ireland (Technological University Dublin and The Digital Hub). The blended learning course is supported by a MOOC and entails 3 modules: 1. Entrepreneurship and management: Notions of entrepreneurship (including social entrepreneurship), how to become an executive of the 21st century (new working culture, corporate-social responsibility, diversity in the workplace). 2. Technology entrepreneurship: the notions of entrepreneurship applied to the specific challenges of starting a business in the technology sectors. 3. Training at a tech startup or a tech hub, giving students a hands-on experience in a technology entrepreneurial ecosystem, either in their place of study or abroad, thus embedding student mobility into the course curriculum. Through this course, the consortium aims to attain the following immediate results for at least 30 female engineering students involved in the piloting: - Improve their knowledge of technology entrepreneurship; - Encourage their entrepreneurial mindset and improve their skills and competences to start a business in technology after graduation; - Provide them networking opportunities with support structures for business incubation and acceleration, both in Europe and in their home countries; - Develop their skills and competences to become the employers of tomorrow: new working culture, promoting workforce diversity as a part of corporate-social responsibility. To scale up the impact, the consortium will rely on its network of technological universities and engineering schools to promote the course and reinforce its replication across Europe and beyond. The MOOC will be available as a self-sustaining course to anyone who enrols; it will be actively promoted among women with a background in tech to empower them to start their own business in the field. To reach this audience, the consortium will work closely with a network of 11 associated partners, advocates for gender equality in tech, that have supported the WITECH project, some of which are the Women’s Forum, Women @ Google and Girls in Tech. The associated partners will also support the consortium in promoting ICT among high school girls: only a small fraction of girls aspires to become ICT experts (under 1% in countries involved according to EIGE, 2015) mainly due to social norms portraying ICT as a men’s sector. To encourage high school girls to consider ICT as a viable career choice, the consortium will hold information and sensibilisation activities presenting tech careers to high school girls. By making the technology curricula more attractive for girls, primarily in Italy, Finland and Ireland, the project is expected to help: - increase the number of girls choosing an ICT field of study; - increase the number of girls and women completing the course on technology entrepreneurship either as part of their Higher Education programme or as a MOOC. Based on the dissemination and replication efforts, the project is expected to contribute to reducing gender imbalances in both entrepreneurship and ICT. The following long-term impacts (5+ years after the project) are expected on the European level: - Increase in the number of female technology entrepreneurs and their overall share among technology entrepreneurs in Europe; - Increase in the overall ICT (and thus STEM) employment, which would help reduce labour market shortages and existing bottlenecks.
This project aims to attain the following short-run results for at least 30 female STEM students: - Improving their knowledge of technology entrepreneurship - Encouraging their entrepreneurial mindset and improving their skills and competencies to start an ICT business after graduation - Providing them with networking opportunities with the support of structures for business incubation and acceleration, both in Europe and in their home countries - Being able to fit the current job market requirements: a new working culture and the promotion of workforce diversity as a part of corporate social responsibility In the long run (5+ years after), we aim to contribute to reducing the gender gap in both entrepreneurship and ICT. We envisage the following impacts at the European level: - Increasing the number of female technology entrepreneurs and their share among technology entrepreneurs in Europe - Reducing women’s poverty due to unemployment and self-selection in low-wage jobs Increasing overall ICT employment and thus reducing shortages of ICT-skilled candidates -Overcoming other bottlenecks in human capital which affect ICT industries (e.g., workers’ aging).
ICT is the fastest-growing sector in Europe and beyond. There is a growing gap between the demand and supply for ICT specialists, estimated at 756,000 by 2020 (Digital skills in the EU labor market, EP, 2017). At the same time, women are significantly underrepresented in this sector because of many social, economic, and cultural barriers and biases. When they do choose ICT, they face a higher risk of dropping out than men because of unfavorable working conditions and a lack of career perspectives. Our project contributed to increasing the attractiveness of STEM curricula, at the Higher Education level, for girls and women, also by raising the diversification of these curricula. To this end, we produced a course on technology entrepreneurship for female students of master's degree programs in Engineering. We illustrate the organization and the structure of the course in the following.