The digital gender gap now has a map, and it shows where Europe needs to go

Girls match boys in science and math at school. Yet walk into any European tech boardroom: women are scarce. Something breaks along the way – in lecture halls, in first jobs, in the slow grind toward seniority.

The pipeline is leaking – and we now know where

The Women in Digital (WiD) Index, developed under the EU-funded Connecting Women in Digital project, tracks women's participation across the full digital career journey across all 27 EU Member States and four global benchmark countries, from secondary school STEM classrooms to ICT leadership roles. It then gives each country a score based on how well it achieves gender equality in the digital sector. The collected data tells us the story of a leaky job pipeline, and we must look at where women fall out.

What the data tell us

The EU average sits at a sobering score of 51.7 (Sweden leads the EU with 76.2). Leadership scores average just 53.3 across the EU, confirming what many already felt: the glass ceiling in digital sectors is real and Europe-wide.

Yet the main insights lie beyond the summary figures. The WiD Index reveals that: 

• Success is rarely uniform across its four pillars (STEM education, ICT education, digital employment, and leadership)
• Some countries boast strong results in ICT education, showing that investment in digital skills for girls is paying off
• However, many of those same countries struggle later in the pipeline: women still face steep drop-offs in digital employment or remain largely absent from senior decision-making roles

This uneven performance matters. A nation that educates women well in digital skills but fails to retain them in the workforce loses its investment and its competitive edge. 

Likewise, a country with robust rates of employment of women but weak representation in leadership faces a different kind of barrier: the invisible ceiling that stalls careers before the top. The WiD Index aims to expose these contrasts with more clarity, showing where momentum builds and where it breaks.

Built for action

The WiD Index is designed to be used. Its interactive dashboard enables policymakers, employers, and educators to explore their country's performance metrics – a nation with strong graduate numbers but weak retention faces a different challenge than one in which leadership forms the bottleneck. This tool makes that distinction visible and, consequently, the right policy response.

The index is honest about its limits, too: leadership data relies on primary survey findings precisely because harmonised official statistics on women in digital leadership barely exist across the EU. That absence is itself a policy failure worth naming.

Applying the evidence

Closing the digital gender gap is a question of talent, competitiveness, economic growth, and defining the kind of digital future Europe will build. The WiD Index offers a long-needed evidence base – the next step is acting on it.