From Victims to Economic Assets: Training Women in an Emerging Digital Society During the Late 1970s to the Mid-1990s

Abstract

The European Community (EC), afraid of lagging behind the United States and Japan in the technology race, developed a series of strategies in the 1980s and 1990s to enhance their position in the field of information and telecommunication technologies (ICT). One key strategy was the training and retraining of citizens to deal with the shortage of a highly skilled labor force. At the same time, women’s issues were being raised as part of the EC’s political agenda, with a particular emphasis on the effects of technological change on the employment of women. We claim that despite the advantageous conditions for promoting women’s advanced education in ICT, the EC’s strategy was to promote only basic computer literacy, following a discourse that victimized women, due to their alleged lack of skills and flexibility. Although by the late 1980s, the view of women as constituting potential economic assets in the EC’s economy became more prominent, the concrete measures for women’s education and training did not substantially change and remained scantily funded and short-sighted throughout the whole period.