Barbara Pisker, Mirjana Radman-Funarić and Željko Sudarić. Women in ICT: The Case of Croatia within European Union. (ICDEc 2021)

1. Women in ICT: The Case of Croatia
within European Union
Barbara Pisker, Mirjana Radman-Funaric, Zeljko Sudaric
The 6th International Conference on Digital Economy
Emerging Technologies and Business Innovation
July 15 - 17, 2021 - Tallinn, Estonia (Online Conference)

2. 1 Introduction
• The main focus of this research paper is to explore and present a
longitudinal trend and track patterns of female ICT sector specialists’
quotas movement in Croatian society within EU-27.
• Since no previous research on the topic for Croatian society has been
found in the earlier literature this paper is considered a foundation
ground towards better understanding of features marking Croatian
ICT sector predominantly a male territory.
• The paper comprises five main parts: introduction, literature review
on relevant recent research and introspective on the digital gender
divide, the data and methodology used in research, results and
discussion including recommendation remedies, and final remarks.

3. 2 Literature review
• The digital gender gap is identified, whereby women access and use
ICTs less than men, which can further exacerbate gender inequalities.
• Strong gender bias in ICT education, training and employment of ICT
specialists is present throughout the European Union (EU), facing two
major issues: an overall shortage of ICT specialists and a vast under-
representation of women among them.
• Vitores and Gil-Juarez alert us of an unexpected declining trend of
women ICT participation in the last decade accross EU.
• C. Castaño Collado and J. Webster recognize the role of women's own
choices as they shape and respond to their balanced work-life career.

4. • Simonsen & Corneliussen raise the question of ICT employed women with
children to reveal reasons for a declining trend of women participation in
the ICT sector in Nordic European countries.
• Cross – cultural analysis thou do not show male dominance in ICT sector all
around the globe (the case of Malaysia).
• Furthermore, attracting and keeping women into computing and ICT is
often made in developmental socio-economic terms related to industry
shortages.
• Additionally, ICTs are seen as a cornerstone of further socio-economic and
environmental transformation toward sustainable development goals,
although it may not be seen as a magic wand but need careful planning,
implementation, monitoring and cross-cultural adaptation.

5. 3 Women ICT specialists in Croatia
• EU's DESI structure comprises five dimensions, subdivided further by 12
sub-dimensions composed of 37 indicators.
• Our research part falls under the Human capital dimension, Advanced skills
and development sub-division focusing on ICT specialists due to the point
in which ICT sector occupations is a traditionally male domain in EU-27,
while ICT specialists are at the top of the EU's skills-shortage list.
• Due to current EU policy focus as well as further developments in ICT, our
paper focuses on ICT specialists defined as those being able to 'develop,
operate and maintain ICT systems and for whom ICTs constitute the main
part of their job', therefore, those whose jobs solely concern ICTs
(programmers, software engineers and alike).

6. Figure 1. Overall employment of ICT specialist, percentage and differences of employment in EU-27 and Croatia

7. Figure 2. Annual dynamics of change in percentage (%) of ICT specialists in the EU-27 and Croatia, males and females

8. Figure 3 Share of female ICT specialists in the total number of ICT specialists, EU-27 and Croatia, 2004 - 2019 in %

9. 4 Data and Methodology
• The paper explores the share of employed female ICT specialists in the ICT
sector's total employment, aged 15 to 74, from 2004 to 2019 in the EU-27
countries.
• The deviation in standard deviations (Z-score) of the European Union
countries from the EU-27 average in 2019 was calculated.
• The data used for the analysis have been obtained from Eurostat (2020):
Employed ICT specialists.
• The broad definition of ICT specialists term is based on the ISCO-08
classification. It includes ICT service managers, ICT professionals, ICT
technicians, ICT installers and servicers - % of individuals in employment
aged 15-74, and Employed ICT specialists - % of women in employment
aged 15-74. Data on total employment (male and female) in the EU-27
were also used for comparison .

10. 5 Result and discussion
Country Employed ICT specialists - % of
women in total employment of the
ICT sector
Deviation from the
EU-27 average, Z-score,
in σ
Rank
BG - Bulgaria 28.1 2,3 1
LT - Lithuania 24.4 1,5 2
LV - Latvia 23.9 1,4 3
RO - Romania 23.5 1,3 4
EE - Estonia 22.8 1,1 5
IE - Ireland 21.4 0,8 6
DK - Denmark 21.1 0,7 7
FI - Finland 21.1 0,7 8
HR - Croatia 20.5 0,6 9
SE - Sweden 20.5 0,6 10
AT - Austria 20.4 0,6 11
EL - Greece 20.2 0,5 12
ES - Spain 19.7 0,4 13
FR - France 19.6 0,4 14
SI - Slovenia 19.5 0,4 15
CY - Cyprus 19.1 0,3 16
PT - Portugal 18.3 0,1 17
EU-27 17.9 0,0
NL - Netherlands 17.3 -0,1 18
BE - Belgium 17.2 -0,2 19
DE - Germany 16.8 -0,3 20
LU - Luxembourg 15.5 -0,6 21
IT - Italy 15.1 -0,6 22
PL - Poland 14.4 -0,8 23
SK - Slovakia 14.0 -0,9 24
MT - Malta 10.9 -1,6 25
HU - Hungary 10.6 -1,7 26
CZ - Czechia 10.2 -1,8 27
Fig. 4. – Share of women in the ICT sector deviation from the EU-27 average in 2019 (standard deviation)
Table 1. The share of women in the ICT sector EU-27 average in 2019 deviation and rank

11. 6 Conclusion
• The results presented show that the deviation of women's employment in
the ICT sector of the EU-27 ranges from -1.8 to 2.3 standard deviations, i.e.
in the 4th to the 99th percentile.
• The results presented show Croatia deviates from the EU-27 average by 0.6
σ while women's overall employment in the Croatian ICT sector is 20.5%.
• This result is positioning Croatia in the upper half of the EU-27 results.
• Study limitation can be found in a quantitative approach showing a single,
narrower side of the overall national frames without deeper socio-
economic clarifications.
• Further research would need to use qualitative methodological approaches
to gain in-depth insight of inter-connections provoking presented EUs
national differences.

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13. Thank you for participation
Please contact:
Barbara Pisker, PhD
bpisker@gmail.com
+385 98 632 002