Data4Food2030 joined the Gender Alliance for Innovation in Agriculture!

A few words for GAIA’s background:
GAIA had to come to terms with certain uncomfortable truths, in order to establish this inclusive alliance. First and foremost, is the acceptance of the fact that women’s wealth of knowledge and capacity in Agri-tech is systematically under-utilised and underestimated. Aiming to bring a decisive shift to the current situation, the project management teams of the EU funded projects Internet of Food and Farm 2020 and SmartAgriHubs, set up a Gender Task Force, GAIA, with two connected teams of communications and analysis. Preliminary internal analysis, carried out in both projects, discovered some interesting, yet uncomfortable numbers:

• Only 14% of project coordinators were women within IoF2020.
• Research teams in SAH consisted of 25% women.
• In total, women represented 21% in Use Cases and 32% in Innovation Experiments.

However, it is a common ground that this is not an isolated issue. In fact, the Commission’s study ‘Women in the digital age’ (Find it here: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/84bd6dea-2351-11e8-ac73-01aa75ed71a1) and the ‘Women in Digital initiative’ (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/women-digital), revealed that few women actually take part in the digital sector. Only 24 out of every 1000 female tertiary graduates have an ICT related subject, of which only six go on to work in the digital sector.

This number is decreasing compared to 2011, so we cannot argue that time will deal with this issue. However, this study also found that if more women entered the digital jobs market, it could create an annual EUR 16 billion GDP boost for the European economy. McKinsey estimated a global amount of 12 trillion. Other studies have found that companies with gender balanced boards demonstrate better decision-making and companies with more women in management have better financial performance.