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The current image of “extreme working” - long and anti-social hours in a male ICT culture that disregards home and family puts off women, said several delegates.

But in an industry on the brink of a serious recruitment shortage the business case to hire more women, older workers, members of ethnic minorities and migrant workers is compelling.

Failure to change could damage a company’s precious employment profile in a Europe increasingly competing for fewer young people as a result of demographic changes and a smaller percentage of youngsters leaving university with maths, physics or computer science degrees.

It’s an issue of corporate social responsibility to reflect increasingly diverse populations.

“To be an employer of choice we will have to be more in line with society and we will have to match the profile of society,” said Laurent Zylberberg from the European telecom employers group ETNO.

At the same time IT companies are changing to become less techie dominated and more business services oriented with requirements for “soft skills” and customer contact skills.



“ICT companies are going to have to reflect the society they work with,” said UNI’s Gerhard Rohde. “This is a pressing issue and companies are going to have to take it seriously.”

Multinationals are also going to have widen the diversity of their global, corporate teams to reflect societies in the countries they expand into.

“They need to integrate new diversity to match the cultures where they go,” said ETNO’s Laurent Zylberberg. “Social dialogue is a process that can help us to move forward,” he told the ICT Forum.

“The idea that social partners don’t have social responsibilities is unacceptable in this day and age,” said Bob Collins. “There’s a vital business case for the implementation of diversity - it’s a strong, measurable case for looking at people as human beings and not units.”



Many young women opt out of science as a career long before they get to university and there were calls at the Forum to engage with teacher unions to promote science to young women students and to get them involved in science at a much younger age (pre-school was one suggestion from Sweden).

In established telecom companies with recruitment freezes and redundancy programmes the problem can be a recruitment freeze and an ageing workforce, equally lacking in diversity. Repeated mergers and takeovers, corporate reorganizations and outsourcing can have the same result.

Deutsche Telekom shed 100,000 jobs and ver.di is trying to tackle the impact of near-shoring through skills shifting and building networks for staff affected, said Robert Killer who heads the works council at T-Systems.



Diversity is not the same as the promotion policies that singularly failed in the past to increase the number of women in ICT, said Maria Schwarz-Wölzl, who coordinates the mature@eu project. “A diversity philosophy covers every human being.”

It might be a migrant worker with a degree driving a taxi in Sweden unable to access the labour market at the right point, it might be older workers rejected on false assumptions about their capabilities.

“We need internal debates and a clear unified strategy,” said Lorenzo De Santis UNI, reporting from on of the workshop sessions



Unions have a task to implement diversity among their own staff, said Chadia Bendada. “We have a diverse membership but our active members are very white, very male and older - and our employees have the same characteristics. It’s important that we are talking to our members and not just talking about them.”

“Diversity management in unions should involve more women, more young people and minorities to ensure labour rights are respected for everybody,” said Lorenzo. “We should learn from each other.”

“It’s not always employers who are the bad guys,” said Berivan Ongörur, from SIF Sweden. “We also have to be convinced this (diversity) is a good thing.”