W20 Series: Digital Equity for Women’s Economic Agency in the European Union Vol. 2

The Digital Leadership Institute, a Brussels-based nonprofit I founded in 2014 with the mission of promoting inclusive digital transformation, has benefitted from such EU funding schemes in order to deliver innovative and award-winning programs that increase participation of girls and women in “ESTEAM”—or “entrepreneurship and arts powered by STEM”—and that contribute to women’s economic agency as professionals, entrepreneurs and leaders across the board. 

In 2020, Move It Forward was the subject of a European Commission-funded program that also delivered an open-source “MIF+ Toolkit” in order to permit other organisations around the world to benefit from the approach, materials and best-practices assembled over a decade of successfully deploying the MIF initiative. By 2023, Move It Forward had been delivered in twenty-five countries, reaching over twelve-hundred participants and launching more than two hundred women-led tech startups, about fifty of which are ongoing.

In its first year, ninety women of diverse backgrounds took part in the Brussels Cypro pilot and completed a Cisco IT Fundamentals bootcamp and AWS Associate trainings. Half were awarded IT certifications, twenty-five percent became Trainer certified, and to date, five percent have become full-time employed with IT organisations. During Covid, Cypro was put on hold and is now being relaunched in collaboration with Amazon Web Services as an official part of their European re/Start program.

Initiatives like Move It Forward and Cypro are successful because they embody best practices to attract and retain girls and women in technology fields. Like all DLI programs, MIF and Cypro explicitly target girls and women as beneficiaries, addressing an underlying negative attitude girls and women sometimes harbour toward STEM, especially Technology, and entrepreneurship.  These programs also deliver gender-responsive digital skills trainings, meaning that program design and delivery address factors that specifically ensure success for girl and women program participants. In addition, Cypro delivers skills in deep and emerging tech fields, while MIF teaches key digital skills that are usable in startup and workplace environments.

Replicating and scaling innovative initiatives, like those that DLI leads, is not an unusual challenge in Europe, a geography of 550 million people speaking dozens of languages across almost thirty sovereign countries.  At the same time, a persistent lack of funding for programs promoting gender equity, including in STEM, is a symptom of institutionalised discrimination across all fields that also manifests as a lack of policy priority-setting on such issues. Public sector leadership in this context is critical, however, because it also stimulates private sector uptake of approaches to promote gender parity, and thereby engenders a virtuous circle of action tackling problems like the gender digital divide.