At the 4th Annual General Meeting of the European Centre for Women and Technology, held the 31st March 2012 in Copenhagen ECWT members have coopted Fiona Fanning, Secretary General at CEPIS, EU Affairs Manager at ECDL Foundation and Thomas Friis Konst, Vice President of the Brussls based Knowledge Economy Network (KEN) as members of the High-Level Advisory Committe of the ECWT.

When presenting the two new members, Eva Fabry, Director of the ECWT stressed, that both organizations and Fiona and Thomas in specific have during the last year considerably contributed to stregthening the links between their organizations and the ECWT and to recruting new members to the ECWT.

Both the Greek and the Spanish National Point of Contact of the ECWT is led by CEPIS Member organizations (HEPIS and ATI respectively) and Lusi Fernandez, Vice President of CEPIS is since the AGM in 2011 member of the ECWT Executive.

Eva Fabry stressed that "the collaboration between CEPIS and ECWT will hopefully result in a real win-win as there are only two profiles in which females are represented at more than 20% (IT Quality Manager & Auditor: 30% and IT Trainer: 41%). In addition, the proportion of female IT professionals is lower than 10% in one third of the profiles; IT Applications Consultant, IT Sales & Marketing Consultant, IT Administrator, Network Manager, Database Administrator and IT Systems Engineer.

In terms of recommendations for the future CEPIS has clearly formulated the need for ‘Urgent measures to redress the gender imbalance in all countries and increase the participation of women I’ ICT careers. The continuation and expansion of existing initiatives that focus on role models and mentoring programs should be replicated and scaled up. Member States should provide fiscal incentives for companies that adopt gender equity as part of their organizational culture, hiring practices and career advancement programs’.

In term of ECWT - KEN collaboration both organizations actively work together for identifying good examples for the added value of gender in regional innovation especially in the technology sector.