Becoming a Woman Coder Erasmus Project

Project Title

Becoming a Woman Coder

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; Inclusion – equity; Gender equality / equal opportunities

Project Summary

Women and employment
Gender equality is one of the founding principles of the EU. In its “Strategy EU 2020”, EU considers it as a growth driver for the economy, employment, social cohesion and long-term development. One of its priorities is the increase of female employment. In Europe, only 60% of women work in contrast to 76% of men. One of the main reasons of this situation is the gender segregation in the labour market. Hence more than a 3 of European working women are predominantly from 6 categories of professions within a list of 130: sales, care work, clerical work, catering, cleaning jobs (Eurostat). These employments are generally paid less, are often part time, and for certain jobs are antisocial hours.

The Employment support structures’ role
Unemployed, low-qualified women and women in precarious employment are the most affected by this phenomenon. Women choose or are guided towards jobs that they believe or are led to believe are appropriate to their skill set related to the domestic sphere (childhood education, care, cleaning, etc). Employment support structures have a crucial role to play in the reorientation of these women. This support is essential to broaden women’s professional horizons regarding jobs traditionally male orientated and often higher paid and less precarious.

The coding profession needs women
Among which these said “masculine” professions, the coding profession offers great opportunities for these women. It is better paid than “care” professions, accessible with short courses, in labour shortage and, most part of companies are looking for more women to enhance gender diversity of staff (only 16% of EU employed ICT specialists are women, only 6% of developers in the world are women). The EU Commission report “Women active in the ICT sector” concludes that including more women in the digital economy could create an annual GDP boost in the EU of EUR 9 billion. Women’s low participation in the digital labour market is a key challenge.

Becoming a woman coder
That’s why the project aims at conceiving specific awareness and training tools to tackle gender stereotypes and specific stereotypes of the profession of developer to foster inclusion of women in code. Considering that an Indeed study reveals that “European employers are subject to a talent shortage in tech [especially with developers]: they have large numbers of vacancies and not enough candidates to fill them”, it is a significant challenge to orientate unemployed and/or low-qualified women and women in precarious employment, to retrain toward the coding profession.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE?
By enhancing specific competencies of professionals, working in structured support networks to help find employment, in the retraining of women toward the coding profession.

WHO IS TARGETED?
Core target group:
•Professionals working in structured support networks to help find employment (in public and private bodies, foundations/associations, social services, etc)
Educational target group:
•Training organisations for professionals working in structured support networks to help find employment
Secondary audience impacted by the project:
•Unemployed and/or low-qualified women and women in precarious employment
•Digital companies, in labor shortage and looking for more women to enhance gender diversity of their staff

THE PROJECT
“Becoming a Woman Coder” aims at creating an online training platform for professionals working in structured support networks to help find employment, to enable them to support unemployed, low-qualified women to consider the coding profession as a possible retraining. This platform will be used by the core and the educational targets.

Firstly, the project will define the factors motivating unemployed and/or low-qualified women and women in precarious employment to retrain towards the coding profession, what advantages they find in that fieldwork, comparing the situation in 5 European countries: Finland, France, Malta and Poland. For that, we will collect testimonies of retrained women to provide the richest qualitative learnings for the training tools of the project (IO1).

Secondly, on the basis of IO1 work, the project will build an online training platform (IO2), which host some training tools:
– an educational cartoon to tackle clichés about coding job in their daily support (IO3)
– a series of mini-videos to show in a different way the coding job, through the lens of women coders that were unemployed, low-qualified before becoming professional coders (IO4)
– an e-learning module for employment professionals to help them guiding women in programming and coding profession and providing them every day useful tools
– a serious game: work situations to learn good practices to ensure the success in the retraining of women that want to become coder (IO6)

Finally, we will conceive a tool-box to enhance the significance and recognition of these specific competencies for integration professionals (IO7).

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 271830 Eur

Project Coordinator

HAUTS DE GARONNE DEVELOPPEMENT & Country: FR

Project Partners

• CJ CONSEIL
• ACROSSLIMITS LTD
• Ohjelmisto- ja e-business ry
• Carrots Foundation