International Women's Day: frauenparade.digital

On International Women’s Day, March 8, women around the world take to the streets for equal rights and against discrimination. Under this year’s motto “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”, the United Nations is highlighting barriers to women’s participation in the digital world.

And this is urgently needed, as the United Nations figures show: To date, 37% of all women do not use the Internet. 259 million women have less access to the internet than men, even though they make up almost half of the world’s population. In Germany
, 12% of women are still offline.

As a consequence, this means that if women have less or poorer access to the internet and do not feel safe online, they are left behind when it comes to developing urgently needed digital skills.

In view of the forecast that 75% of jobs will be in STEM fields by 2050, the opportunities for a career in these occupational fields will also deteriorate. Apart from the fact that this development could have fatal consequences for participation in the labor market in general, women are particularly important in STEM professions. This is where the digital world is shaped and access options are created or not.

Many disciplines related to the digital transformation are still male-dominated. Although there is a clear upward trend in the number of female students in computer science, for example, the proportion of women among all university graduates in STEM fields actually declined between 2013 and 2019, as the G7
Dashboard on Gender Gaps shows.

Exciting MINT support programs in Karlsruhe

Early education and female role models are important tools to change this. Early education programs aimed specifically at girls help to awaken their interest.

This is why the promotion of girls is also an important priority in Karlsruhe. We have compiled some of the offers in our overview article “Women in IT professions: Karlsruhe initiatives support women from elementary school to university”.

she.codes, an association of computer science students, provides a deeper insight into the initiative and the “Code togetHER” program.

Female role models from Karlsruhe

And once women have found their way into digitization-related degree courses, it is important to keep them in these professions. Role models can make a decisive contribution to this, as they show possibilities, help us to define our own goals and we can learn from their experiences. In our blog series #DigiWomenKA, Katharina Iyen meets one such role model from Karlsruhe’s digital sector once a month to find out more about them, their experiences and their commitment.

Further information on International Women’s Day 2023 on social media can be found under the hashtags #EmbraceEquity #IWD, #InternationalWomensDay #IWD2023, #DigitALL