Empower Girls to Embrace Their Digital and Entrepreneurial Potential (GEM)

Closing the gender gap to reach Europe’s full innovation potential
Digital innovations and technologies play an essential role in Europe’s prosperity. Yet digitalisation exposes a challenge to the labour market: it transforms the amount, variety and types of jobs with rapid pace, more rapid than people have managed to come along. A large majority of EU28 countries have recently experienced recruitment difficulties due to a substantial lack of suitable candidates (STEM Alliance, 2017). Commissioner Gabriel said that “Encouraging women into this [digital] field and building a gender balanced tech sector will play an important role in order to boost innovation and bring economic benefits to the European Economy” (COM, 2018c). But, “the lack of interest among girls to pursue studies in ICT and STEM remains a clear problem. This leads to lost social and economic opportunities and risks reinforcing gender inequality” (COM, 2018d). To underline it with facts: only 15% of tech sector worker sin EU are women (COM, 2018b), for every 1000 women only 24 graduate in ICT-related fields (Iclaves, 2018).

Since research has found that the largest influence on female decisions is due to controllable factors, such as encouragement (e.g. through family influence) and exposure to sector related topics (e.g. to raise awareness of ICT careers) (Wang et al., 2015) we will address and convince 4 main stakeholder groups to engage in the supportive process. That are:

(1) Families/friends/close human environment
(2) Business/industry representatives
(3) Policy makers and media and
(4) Educational stakeholders such as teachers, HEI, informal learning providers.
GEM Summer Schools as STEM4Girls to bring Girls2STEM and GEM Network for support

To ignite interest in girls and inspire them to engage in STEM/ICT, our Summer School will be organized to achieve 5 crucial objectives:

• girls with STEM (especially ICT) knowledge,
• girls with knowledge about the STEM/digital world of work,
• girls with entrepreneurial mind-sets,
• girls with transversal skills and
• girls with knowledge of inspiring role models and their meaning.

These summer schools will be organized twice in each country, evaluated and optimized. Recommendations for organization and content of GEM Summer Camps will be publically available after the end of the project for others to also organize these Summer Camps, thus providing sustainability.

GEM Network will be build and extended by including representatives from HEI, ministries, businesses, schools, education providers, municipalities and research centres. The network will agree on purposeful measures, which meets the needs of the target groups and project objectives.