While it is a fact that after the digital revolution more and more people increasingly turn to digital jobs and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry in the European Union shows a positive growth of about 120,000 new jobs per year, technology companies face a critical shortfall of talented ICT experts. This contradictory picture reveals a mismatch between the skills on offer and those in demand in today's fast developing technology market. Furthermore, it showcases that gender stereotyping prevails in the ICT sector which remains still male-dominated, with women particularly under-represented.

In fact, more women are employed in ICT jobs in the non-ICT sector than within it. This suggests that the occupational segregation of women within the IT sector persists. Women traditionally cluster in data entry jobs and in hardware assembly work, while only 9 out of 100 application developers in Europe are women. Also, 19% of managers in the ICT sector are women (the figure in other service industries is 45 %) while the proportion of female to male computer science graduates is 3 to 10. Finally, women tend to leave the industry in mid-career to a much greater extent than men: since the ICT sector employs 20% of women aged 30 with a degree in ICT, but only 9% of women over 45 years.

As a result, facing a shortage of up to 500,000 ICT professionals by 2015 and risking its potential for growth and digital competitiveness, Europe needs to redress the skills gap. The key is to curb the negative trends and encourage more women to pursue careers in ICT industry. In this context, the Commission in March 2013 launched the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs: a multi-stakeholder partnership to facilitate collaboration among business and education providers, public and private actors to take action attracting young people into ICT education, and to retrain unemployed people, aiming to increase the supply of ICT practitioners by 2015. In addition, it also launched Action 60 in order to promote a higher participation of young women and women returners in the ICT workforce through support for web-based training resources, game based eLearning and social networking.

The participation of women in the digital economy can only be regarded as essential and a priority for the Greek Presidency as well, since new technologies - because of the flexibility they offer - help women reconcile family and professional life. To this effect, Greece’s General Secretariat for Gender Equality, has put forward a “Digital Alliance for female employment based on Information and Communication Technology", along the lines of the Commission's Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs. On the basis of a joint cooperation protocol, 21 participating public and private sector bodies will implement actions for digital education, training, employment and entrepreneurship for women and youth, as well as actions to combat social exclusion, in the field of new technologies and digital economy.

The partnership will be presented at a conference, on 4 April, titled “Women & Girls Go Digital – WGGDG, National Action Plan for increasing the female talent in digital jobs» which aims to demonstrate the link between e-Skills, Gender Diversity and ICT as a key factor for economic growth based on the creation of digital jobs.