The definition of Gender Mainstreaming by the Council of Europe (1998):

Gender Mainstreaming is the (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of all political processes with the aim to implement a gender-specific awareness and equal opportunities into all (political) fields, at all levels and through all phases, by all (political) actors and decision makers."

Related to this official definition the strategy of Gender Mainstreaming has the aim to "mainstream" gender-specific conditions of equal opportunities between men and women. That means, Gender Mainstreaming should represent a guiding line through all fields of acting and decision-making. Therefore, Gender Mainstreaming is a cross section task for all levels and fields of acting of an organisation or a political area, thus becoming a task throughout society.

Since the Amsterdam Treaty was ratified in 1999, the principle of Gender Mainstreaming has been established on a European level, and all member countries of the European Community are required to implement equality of men and women.

A short introduction and overview concerning aims, activities and results of GemCITE

Although there is a variety of activities and projects to realise equal opportunities in the field of IT, at this moment there is no universally valid Gender Mainstreaming concept to manage and to improve all IT vocational trainings. The existing projects are all limited to institutional or local single measures, women advancement or allocation of quotas.

The project GemCITE should work for this problem. GemCITE should connect all relevant factors and criteria to a holistic and integrated concept for the implementation of Gender Mainstreaming into IT vocational training.

By the transnational cooperation, the GemCITE concept should offer a possibility for all educational institutions in Europe (especially in the partner countries) to implement Gender Mainstreaming even into their own vocational training concepts.

GemCITE has the aim to support the development and improvement of equal opportunities in IT training and to increase awareness of all operational actresses and actors in IT vocational training with regard to their contribution to the strategy of Gender Mainstreaming.

The cooperation with small and medium sized enterprises will have the benefit that the needs of the employers will get included by their current evaluation and control of the GemCITE results. On the other hand, this cooperation should have positive effects on the awareness raising on the labour market.

A good concept for market orientation and various products (posters, folders, CD Rom`s, infoletters, homepage, handbook,...) will help disseminate the results.

What have been our motives to realise GemCITE?

The absence of women in the IT labour market and also in higher level IT-vocational training programs is evident by a lot of international studies.

During the last century, 3 million new jobs have been created, 1.6 million of them for women. More than 60 % of the jobs created between 1995 and 2000 are in the high technology sector, where women are extremely underrepresented. Still, the labour market is divided according to gender, with women being recruited mostly for applying new technologies and for data processing. Men rather dominate the creative areas of software development and system analysis.

Although the 5th framework programme for technology and research of the EU requires
at least 40 % participation of each gender, less than 20 % of informatics students and only
14.5 % business founders in the multimedia sector are women.

In all EU countries there are more girls than boys in higher education, still the possibility of girls studying natural sciences, mathematics, computer technology etc. is by far less.

A lot more women than men take part in practically orientated job programmes, and less women than men take part in theoretical and scientific programmes or in programmes that open the gates for jobs with high requirements.

Trainings in communication networks and programming are dominated by men. Women are rather to be found in trainings for text processing programmes, which prepare them for secretarial work.

(All data from: European Parliament, Plenary Session Document 15.07.2003 RR/504088DE.doc
Report on women in the new information society;
Committee for Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities; Reporter: Anna Karamanou)