Why are digital soft skills essential to fight against the exclusion of women entrepreneurs?

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2020, the active participation of women in the working area is declining, which increases the gender wage gap.

One of the explanations for this phenomenon is due to the fact that women, and especially women entrepreneurs, work in increasingly automated sectors and often do not have digital education backgrounds.

Indeed, women in Europe represent only 18% of ICT and only 20% obtain diplomas related to ICT. Positions of responsibility also require a good knowledge of technological tools, which makes them less accessible for women.

Among the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs, the lack of access to financing, representation and network are the most frequent. However, digital skills are also powerful tools for combating social exclusion, promoting lifelong learning, identifying resource persons and being informed of existing opportunities.

Whether it’s joining communities of peers, staying informed of funding programs, or even taking training courses from all over the world at a lower cost – but also and even more so in entrepreneurship – knowing how to analyze and using data for issues of governance, market analysis, innovation or even data protection: digital skills promote access to work, knowledge and money.

They allow women entrepreneurs to create, stabilize and develop their business in the era of digitalization of work and more broadly of societies. Digital skills are particularly important in the fields of tourism and creative industries, either to improve sustainable practices (reducing digital footprints, mobility – catering – energy waste, anticipating risks and challenges, ect) and to access the international market.

It is important here to distinguish between basic digital skills (search engines or the use of digital services), where the gender gap among the younger generation (24-50) is very small, and advanced digital skills.

According to the same report, while digital skills in general are unequally distributed between men and women aged 50 and over – for the younger generation (24-50) the gap is widening further in terms of the types of digital soft skills:

Men have more advanced digital skills than women in most areas and especially soft-war and problem solving/governance, which are essential for business, except in information and communication where women are more advanced.

Through the Academy of the Off The Beaten Track project, modules dedicated to data and digital economic literacy aim precisely to re-balance this gap by promoting the learning of women concerning the preponderant digital skills in sustainable entrepreneurship for tourism and creative industries.”