The Digital Way to Employment: Addressing cultural barriers and stereotyping for women careers in digital

The digital sector, often viewed as a rapidly expanding and innovative field with promising future employment prospects, is nonetheless marked by gendered dynamics and segregation, evidenced by a declining representation of women. Factors contributing to this disparity include gender stereotypes, a divide in digital skills and educational backgrounds, a masculine organizational culture, and challenging working conditions that hinder work-life balance. Despite an increasing demand for ICT-related skills and a projected shortage of digital skills in the EU by 2020, the underrepresentation of women persists. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the world's digital transformation, emphasizing its effectiveness for personal, social, and professional advancement. This shift is crucial, especially as traditional businesses face economic sustainability challenges, impacting labor stability, particularly for women who are at a higher risk of labor and social exclusion. Encouraging women to pursue courses and careers in the digital sector is not only a matter of social justice and diversity but is also deemed an economic and social necessity given the changing landscape and demands of the digital era.

"The Digital Employment Empowerment" project strives to empower women through an innovative learning journey into digital occupations, targeting those at risk of labor market exclusion. Focused on the unemployed or those returning after a career gap, it aims to enhance their understanding and attitudes toward digital careers, fostering participation in high-wage, high-skill fields for increased inclusion, employability, and economic security. The project identifies impactful women in digital roles as role models, providing guidelines for attitude change through high-quality career guidance, digital storytelling, coaching, facilitation, and support actions. Offering a hands-on learning experience, it enables women to explore digital career essentials, while building mentor and provider capacity to support successful entry into digital job-related employment. The project supports organizations in planned digital transformation approaches, enhancing team capacity for effective mentoring and women-focused training. This initiative seeks individual empowerment and systemic change in the digital employment landscape.

Project activities are as follows: - Setting up a network of stakeholders (women associations and organisations, educational institutions, adult education providers, job orientation agencies, cultural and emancipation centers) in the partner countries. They will be involved in the research, development, testing, application and feedback of different project activities. They will be also used as the main channel for sustaining the project results after the project ends. - Performing research in partner countries and identifying and selecting existing good practices - active women in digital occupations in the partner countries and beyond - Identifying role models and elaborating description of their success stories - Developing of comprehensive career guidance package of tools and training plans for guiding training and support for digital career of women - Elaborating practical suggestions and examples of workplace strategies and mechanisms to create pathways for women seeking employment outside the “gender-normative” - Development of an online collaborative hub providing a place and multimedia tools in order to introduce and support young women’s motivation and orientation to the world of digital jobs - Implementing a web campaign tailored for women to introduce them into digital professions and career opportunities - Organisation of exploitation seminars and a final international conference for dissemination, valorisation and sustainability.

The main outcomes expected both during the project lifetime and after its end are the following: - Improved motivation and skills for women to consider careers in the digital sector - Improved opportunities for women referring their inclusion, employability and economic security - Effective methodology and tools for adult trainers and mentors to motivate, advise and support women in their digital journey - Knowledge and experience gained by partner organisations in the field of transnational cooperation and innovative practices to inspire and involve more women into careers outside the “gender-normative”. Project results: 1. ‘Female Role models in Digital’ identifies and selects relevant case studies - active women in the digital sector in the partner countries and beyond to provide clear picture on what set of skills are important and needed to be improved to ensure the success and sustainability of the employability and entrepreneurial activity in the sector, as well as key success factors that underpin women’s’ effective and equal inclusion in the labour market 2. ‘Women Learning Journey Guidelines’ offers a comprehensive career guidance package of tools and training plans for guiding career in digital of women. These resources will be designed to empower adult trainers and career guidance facilitators to find the right kind of information that will benefit the women in their communities as well as facilitate their long-term career planning in the digital sector and entry into the job market. 3. Online hub and ultimedia toolkit "Job Paths for Women in Digital” introduces women to different digital job paths and provides a "comfort space" for communication on the topic. The online hub aims to equipping women with a wealth of development resources, advice and inspiration, from impact stories and experiences to workplace strategies and online couching. The multimedia toolkit will be developed as an online tool with informative and educational character, which contains practical suggestions and examples of different kinds of workplace strategies and mechanisms across three areas: attraction, education and training, and networking. “The Digital way to Employment” results will be designed and available as free online resources so that, in practical terms, they are open for use at any level - local, regional, national, European and international, which is prerequisite for sustainability.