Women's Day: Only every tenth IT company is female

Vienna - Austria is looking for around 24.000 IT specialists. An opportunity that women in particular still take far too seldom. This is also shown by the apprenticeship statistics in Vienna. The popularity ranking among women is: retail clerk, hairdresser, office clerk. Self-employed IT entrepreneurs in Vienna are also few and far between. One of them is the engineer Claudia Behr, who has been looking for a suitable IT specialist for a long time and is also involved as an industry representative. The Viennese IT professional group spokesman Ing.Rüdiger Linhart, BA MA, appeals to women to make better use of the opportunities and explains the diverse possibilities there are. 

Working hours of up to 14 hours per day are not uncommon for the independent IT service provider Claudia Behr. With the right support, the 48-year-old could not only step a little quieter herself, but also accept more jobs. Behr has been self-employed since 2006 and has been looking for a suitable employee for almost two years. She is not alone in this. The economy as a whole is losing a lot of potential as a result. She then hired a man. Incidentally, she is very satisfied with his performance. Now she was lucky again: On April 1st, a female IT specialist joined the male employees in her web agency. For Behr, equal opportunities are lived in both directions.

Only around ten percent of the Vienna Chamber members in IT are women

“Unfortunately, women are even less likely to seize the diverse future opportunities in information technology than men. In total, we lack around 24.000 skilled workers in Austria, ”explains Rüdiger Linhart, IT professional group spokesman at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. Currently, just under ten percent of Vienna's IT service providers are run by women, as a look at the statistics on the occasion of International Women's Day on March 8 shows.

Both introverted and extroverted women are in demand

The career opportunities and training paths in IT are as diverse and promising as in hardly any other industry. From apprenticeships to HTL to technical colleges and university training, there is something for everyone. “There is not the only right way. I know gifted programmers who only want to program and don't mess around with other subjects at school. Others prefer to study IT, do research or are more of the communicative type and later go into project management, ”explains Linhart. The areas of activity after the training range from app programming and website development to the design of user interfaces. The apprenticeships "Application Development - Coding" and "Information Technology" with a focus on industrial engineering and systems technology offer great opportunities for development, especially for women who are practice-oriented.

Ask personal questions in the chat

"It's a shame that so much female potential remains untapped in Austria, especially since work in IT is paid better than in other industries," explains Behr, who is the vice chairman of the Vienna Expert Group for Management Consulting, Accounting and Information Technology (UBIT Vienna) also involved in representing the industry. Together with Linhart, she will be on Sunday March 7th, 2021 at the “Best digital 2021“Supervise a virtual education level from 15:20 pm to 16:00 pm. There the two want to bring all interested parties closer to the diverse future opportunities. Linhart will also be available in the chat on Friday, March 5th from 13:00 p.m. to 17:00 p.m. for personal questions.

Linhart, who also runs an IT company, also started a female SAP specialist at the beginning of the year. So the positive signals for International Women's Day are encouraging.

Photo: Ing.in Claudia Behr (IT entrepreneur, deputy chairman of the UBIT Vienna specialist group) © Alexander Müller