Are we ready now? On gender equality in the IT industry

I know what it's like when there are no role models. My generation had virtually no role models at all in technical professions.

I started studying at a technical college in 1975 and in my year we were five women among almost 200 men. During my college years I had one (!) female teacher, it was in computer security. During my first years at a consulting company, in the first half of the 1980s, I can only remember three female clients in management positions: they were at FMV and at the then Peab and Digital Equipment. We simply had no female role models and for most of us women, it was not on the map that we would at some point in the future be able to become managers over male engineers. Rather, we were worried about getting a job at all in the field we were trained for. I'm sure you can imagine what a start we had.

No, we are definitely not there yet. The IT and telecom industry is not equal. But I still have to give credit to our industry. With a poor starting point in terms of the proportion of women trained in IT and technology, we in the industry still have many companies that have worked, and are actively working on the issue for many years. The willingness and insight is very high in many places and compared to other technically oriented industries, such as the construction or energy sector, the difference is huge. So we deserve a little pat on the back.

Womentor - a leadership program for women

For more than 10 years, IT&Telekomföretagen has run a leadership program, Womentor, for companies in the industry that want to actively work to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions. The purpose of Womentor has been threefold:

1. A leadership program for women in the industry that provides relevant leadership tools.
2. A change program for participating companies that receive tools for their own structured work on gender equality and diversity.
3. A way to increase the ability of the whole industry to attract and retain the best talent - regardless of gender.

We are currently carrying out an evaluation because we want to develop the program so that it even more clearly meets the needs of tomorrow's working life. Because no - we are not done yet - far from it.

Womentor as a driver of gender equality and role model

We can note that the companies that participate in the program and conduct structured gender equality work increase the proportion of women in management positions. One might think that this goes without saying. As far as the industry is concerned, we set a target of 40% women in the industry. We're not there yet, but the proportion of women is fairly constant at around 30%. And we see that the more technical the jobs are, the lower the proportion of women. Among programmers and systems engineers, it's around 20 percent.

But most importantly, it has helped to raise the profile of successful women at different levels of the industry. I cannot stress enough the importance of role models - for children and young people choosing an education, for new graduates with their first job, and for all those working in companies and organizations who have an impact on leadership recruitment and career development.

Gender equality work not on target

But we are not done with our gender equality work. We will only be when we all see women as equal in the workplace, or as Nobel Laureate Donna Strickland put it:
- I don't consider myself a female Nobel Laureate in Physics, I consider myself a Nobel Laureate in Physics.
We are not there yet.