Women in Digital at FOI
December 18, 2024
The Women in Digital conference was held at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics (FOI) in Varaždin, where students of the higher grades of the Medical High School and 1st and 2nd Grammar Schools in Varaždin could hear first-hand the inspiring stories of female experts from the IT industry in order to motivate themselves for a STEM career .
The event brought together eminent female speakers from the digital technology industry, including our own Mirjana Kranjčić, graduate electrical engineer and Manager DevOps eHealth at ENT.
“It is an honor to participate in such an event and invite girls to join the IT world. Today I will tell you about my journey: from a high school in Virovitica to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, a small private company that we would nowadays call a start-up and finally Ericsson Nikola Tesla. It’s a wonderful experience, but there are still too few women in the IT world, so this is a great opportunity to invite girls to dare to change the world,” she pointed out. “Girls are not aware of how important their contribution is. This is not an exclusively male profession. This is the profession of the future,” concluded Kranjčić.
In order to encourage women’s participation in the digital sector, at the proposal of the European Commission, 27 EU Member States and Norway signed a Declaration on the Commitment on women in digital in April 2019. In Croatia, the implementation of the Declaration at the national level is coordinated by the Ministry of Justice, Public Administration and Digital Transformation in cooperation with the Office for Gender Equality.
There are still fewer women than men in jobs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM fields), but also in educational programs related to them, which, according to the European Parliament’s Report on promoting gender equality in STEM, is not only the case in the Republic of Croatia, but in all the Member States of the European Union. “I believe that a profession should not be tied to gender, but to the interest, talent, will and effort that an individual invests in their area of interest, and today we have gathered to introduce you to the possibilities of working in information and communication technologies,” emphasized the Minister of Justice, Public Administration and Digital Transformation Damir Habijan at the conference, wishing all the pupils success in their further education.
At the end of the event, the pupils who attended the conference filled out a survey, the results of which showed not only that they were satisfied with the conference, but also that after all the inspiring stories they heard, a large number of them were encouraged to choose a faculty in the ICT field.
