The office of Eesti Energia was still full of electricity this week (after the historical weekend, when Estonian electricity system was connected to the European) – the members of the sector Women’s Leaders Club got together.
This time we got to hear the winner of the title of the best IT manager of the year, Liisa Soosuu, head of the IT department of Häirekeskus | Estonian Emergency Response Centre, about her journey. Kaisa Knight, advisor to the The Gender Equality and Equal Treatment Comissioner/Võrdõigusvoliniku kantselei, spoke about diversity in the organization.
In Estonia, less than a third (22%) of the ICT sector are women specialists. It was found that although people's interests are very different, our chosen work areas have been too divided according to gender stereotypes. But it shouldn't. Different perspectives and life experience are welcome, for example, in the development of products and services - their consumers are also different.
Gender equality allows us to win both as a society and economically. The Estonian economy as a whole suffers from the wage gap, and the wage gap is also later transferred to pensions. This is a problem that must be consciously dealt with in Estonia, both in the public and private sectors.
Although everyone's contribution is important on this journey, one should approach the topic of diversity in a broader way and look at the picture from the organizational level. Diversity is well managed when the specificities of all team members are taken into account at every step, both in organizing events and implementing the general work culture, etc. It is necessary to deal with formulating the company's values and raising the awareness of the workforce.
#womeninIT #diversity
The Women in Nordic ITS 2 (WIN-ITS 2) project is co-funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers, EIT Urban Mobility, Trivector Traffic, ITS Estonia, ITS Finland, Iceland Translation Services ITS / ITS Iceland and ITS Norway.
