7/30/2019 Expanding Horizons With Government Support

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Expanding horizons with government supportA combination of approaches to ensure benefits from pro-women policies and to prepare for future

workforce needs, includes the need for training and career support at three distinct levels:

1. for entrance levels by way of education, training, recruitment, internship and career incentives,

which require a national reassessment of educational infrastructure and delivery systems;

2. for mid-career levels through career promotion and training; and

3. for management and senior levels through mentorship, skill improvement and sponsorshipprogrammes.in the ICT sector need to take the time to engage with

community initiatives to mentor girls and women and participate in virtual and face to face communities

of practice.

In emerging economies like India, where women have been working in the software industry for over a

decade, the sector appears to offer more gender-equitable work opportunities than do other forms of

engineering, and women have been quick to take up this space.11 Where a lot of ICT work was outsourced

out of the UK and into Asia, the participation of women in ICT work grew as a whole.12 In the software

industry in India for instance, women worked as operators or programmers while men were predominant

in managerial positions as project leaders or departmental managers.

These are classic cases of vertical gender segregation, with women more strongly represented in lower

level ICT occupations than in higher status and higher paid professions. In developed economies where

the ICT sector has matured from robotic and clerical work to innovation and design, there is, for a

variety of reasons, a clear trend in the number of women in ICT jobs declining over time18. The ensuing

gaps have been filled with migrant labourers from emerging economies some of whom are women.

The career-family balancePartly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs

with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards

fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is

perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but

only 18 per cent of engineers.Source: The Economist July 23rd2011And while studies document a startling absence of women in most ICT job categories, there are still

regions where women are entirely absent from the ICT sector, where they face many obstacles that

prevent them from entering the field of technology, adopting it as a career and working in the ICT sector.

These obstacles play a significant role in shaping the decision-making of women and limiting their choices

in the ICT space. They are also factors that have for a long time affected their awareness of their capacityand of the benefits of ICT to their social, career, and family lives. Persistent socio-cultural norms trap

womens thinking and ability, and limit their mobility whether they are living in a thriving urban centre or

a remote rural village. They are at a higher risk of being marginalized from todays Information Society,

due to unequal access to training, the lack of country-specific Internet content, high Internet connectivity

costs, and the lack of awareness and policy advocacy.