Intervention Strategies to Increase the Proportion of Girls and Women Studying and Pursuing Careers in Technological Fields: a West European overview

Abstract

Although Western European countries are behind Eastern European countries in regard to the numbers of women studying and working in technical fields, the past decade has seen the development of a wide range of special projects aimed at changing this situation. The paper reviews a wide range of intervention strategies which have been developed and introduced to deal with identified barriers to girls’ or women's involvement with technology in Western Europe. There has been increasing recognition of the need to try to increase the interaction of young girls with technology. At the same time older women are being seen as a fruitful source of potentially self-confident recruits to technical training. The issue of sexism in education and training institutions and in the work place is being faced, and more is being done to help women engineers and scientists cope with the dual roles of working technologists and family carers