Developing an Inclusive Tech Ecosystem in the Nordic and Baltic Regions

Project period

January 2019 – October 2021

Background information

The gender gap in the technology sector is a persistent challenge for the labour market and there is a gender equality issue in the Baltic Sea countries, with too few women choosing careers in the technology sector. A growing range of social initiatives are now being established to try to address this challenge; however, they are often fragmented. As a result, they lack the support or resources needed for collaborations and scale-ups. Therefore the Nordic Council of Ministers together with the Women Go Tech mentorship programme has launched a project to identify grass-root social initiatives that are encouraging female participation in tech sector, with the aim to build a partnership network across the Baltic Sea Region. The project will help to share experience and knowledge across different organisations, to showcase good examples and ultimately to scale-up such initiatives within and across countries in the Baltic Sea and Nordic Region.

Tech field is full of opportunities, however in Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) only few women are able to make use of those opportunities due to existing stereotypes. For example, no more than 20% of the workers in Tech sector in Lithuania are women and even more worryingly no more than a quarter of ICT or engineering students are female.

Also from the business side the demand is clear: every year Tech sector offers more than 2 000 new jobs in Lithuania, but many of them remain vacant; Lithuania ICT sector alone will need at least 13 500 new ICT specialists by the year 2020.

Project purpose and goals

The aim of this project is to map the existing good practice initiatives across the Baltic and Nordic Region– in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. Through cooperation, the project organizers hope to achieve a stronger, as well as a more sustainable impact with regard to gender equality in the technology sector. The project will be implemented through collaborations with such initiatives and stakeholders as Riga Tech Girls (Latvia), Tech Sisters (Estonia), GoGetty (Denmark), Potential Company (Denmark), Stockholm Startup Weekend (Sweden) and others.

The purpose of the project is to create a strong partnership network between NGOs, businesses and policy makers to share experience and good practices in addressing gender gap issues within technology sector in order to build capacity of NGOs in the Nordic-Baltic area to better address this challenge. Furthermore, the new network will be used for partnership building to expand and further develop the Women Go Tech programme as well as other good practice grassroot initiatives within and across countries of the Baltic sea region.

Major events and activities within the project:

Seminars and meetings in Latvia, Estonia, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.
Participation with a report at a conference in Finland on April 22, 2021.
Closing conference in Lithuania in autumn 2021.