Debate: The EU priorities for the th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women
Date: TUESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2023
Speaker: Helena Dalli
Language: EN

This year's W addresses one of the main challenges of our times: how to ensure that the digital transition, innovation and science, technology, engineering and mathematics – the STEM sectors – are an opportunity for all and that obstacles or abuses are tackled in particular from a gender perspective. This is in line with the EU's priorities and objective of the twin transition. The gender equality strategy in particular underlined the importance of gender mainstreaming of the digital transition. I therefore welcome your questions. The gender equality strategy and the third edition of the gender action plan underlined the importance of gender mainstreaming in all policy areas and priorities, including the digital transition, innovation and research and STEM area. The European Commission's digital strategy, in particular, aims to make the digital transformation work for people and businesses while helping to achieve its target of a climate neutral Europe by 2050.  The strategy sets a target of 80% of the population having basic digital skills and 20 million ICT specialists by 2030. In achieving this target, we need to tackle the gender digital gap as we know that only 19% of ICT specialists are women. Women working in ICT earn almost 20% less than men. One in three STEM graduates are women and 93% of capital invested in European companies this year went to all male-founded teams. We promote an increased participation and representation in STEM, in particular in engineering, ICT and advanced digital skills, all crucial for the development and future of our societies. This is also one of the eight key competencies of the European Education Area Strategic Framework.  We have also raised the need to attract more women and girls in STEM in our structured dialogues on digital education and skills with the Member States. We are funding a series of actions to attract girls to STEM and to bridge the digital gender gap under our horizon Europe and Erasmus programmes. Examples of projects are training programmes in digital and sustainable entrepreneurship, competencies for girls and the European researchers’ night and researchers at schools which want to gauge the interest of girls and women in research careers. Our projects also support women-led deep tech start-ups through a pilot scheme called Women TechEU. Moreover, we introduce a new condition in the Horizon Europe programme, which has the potential to become a game changer for gender equality in research and innovation. Organisations that want to apply for Horizon Europe must have a gender equality plan in place to be eligible for EU funding.  Encouraging women's participation in STEM also allows us to tackle the digital gap. We have set our concrete actions to this end in our schools agenda and digital education action plan for 2021-2027. We monitored the gender digital divide through the women and digital scoreboard. Also to cyber violence, our proposal for a directive to combat violence against women and domestic violence includes a focus on this form of violence. We proposed decriminalisation of common forms of gender-based violence and measures that allow to quickly remove illegal gender-based online content. The specificities of cyber violence, are also reflected and provisions on the protection and support to victims, as well as in prevention measures and access to justice. Moreover, in the Digital Services Act, we set out a comprehensive approach towards all forms of illegal content and look at online platforms’ liability.  With all these actions, we hope to substantially contribute to making the digital transition an opportunity for all, especially for women and girls.