Viviane Reding plans to get More Women into IT
The European Union Commissioner wants a promotion to work against the usual typecast of the professional women as too technical and boring. Viviane Reding, the Commissioner of European Commission for information media & society and the ambassador against the overcharge roaming charges did set her views on the deflating geeky IT typecasts that she feels are setting women off working in the technology. Very soon Viviane Reding aims to establish a European code of most excellent performance for women in the IT sector in order to address the alleged absorbent channel incident. Whereby most of the females get bored gradually in working in the IT sector as they develop through education and settle on a particular career.
In her statement Reding said that they require to prevail over the usual typecasts that illustrate ICT careers as too technical and uninteresting fro women. Instead should persuade women to succeed in this innovative, multi-faceted and exciting sector. Reding also cautioned that the European region must deal with its deficiency of qualified IT staff as a main concern or threat declining behind the IT competitors in the Asian region. According to the European Commission, the IT sector has also contributed to the quarter of European Union’s entire development and 4 % of its jobs. However, there is a deficiency of about 300,000 qualified IT staff.
Therefore, attracting more women is very much essential in order to assist to seal the talents gap. For the past two years, the European Commission has been running a program for IT work-shadowing that offers females a chance of choosing their careers. Previous researches from the IT sector talents organization, e-skills UK has established several number of computing students in the region had declined to 50 % since the last five years whereas, the number of females working in the IT sector had fallen to one out of five workers.
According to the analysis conducted by European commission in October 2007, from the 150 telecommunication companies in Europe, they found that the average percentage of women working was only 6 %. It is because women are normally under-signified at the senior administrative level in the IT sectors. The European Commission has also published an entire report that looks in the gender balance in the upper levels of the senior administration which entitled men and women decision making 2007. According to the report, men represent almost 10 board members in most of the top companies and the also make 2/3rd of companies bosses.
Talking about the deficiency of women in the IT sector with the silicon.com, Mary Turner CEO of Tiscali UK said that IT is only the part of this bigger outlook, it is not only women in the IT sector it is women in the boardrooms and also in the management. However, Turner was confident of changes in the near future. She said that the technology is distinguished as a geeky field for men; nevertheless they are seeing more women coming forward to work in these sectors. She thinks that it would be exponential since everything in life one needs the first team to come in and then extend in the world and persuade.
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