Women in Digital Conference at Croatian FOI

The Women in Digital conference was held at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics (FOI) in Varaždin. High school students had a chance to hear first-hand the inspiring stories of female experts from the IT industry to motivate themselves for a STEM career.

“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,” said Mirjana Kranjčić, graduate electrical engineer and Manager of DevOps eHealth at ENT. “Girls are not aware of how important their contribution is. This is not an exclusively male profession. This is the profession of the future.”

To encourage women’s participation in the digital sector, 27 EU Member States and Norway signed a Declaration on the Commitment to Women in Digital in April 2019, at the European Commission's proposal. In Croatia, the Ministry of Justice, Public Administration, and Digital Transformation coordinates the implementation of the Declaration at the national level in cooperation with the Office for Gender Equality.

There are still fewer women than men in jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM fields), but also in educational programs related to them, which is not only the case in Croatia but in all of the EU. “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.