Inside Thematic Working Group 1 on ICT Education within the Women in Digital Forum: a researcher's testimony
After ten months in the Thematic Working Group 1 (TWG1) of our Women in Digital Forum, Weijie Huang, PhD researcher at Utrecht University working on AI governance and gender justice, reflects on her experience and offers insights into the making of EU digital education policy, sharing a testimony about her work and the status of the group’s research. To understand what she learned during her time in TWG1, it is necessary to look first at how the group itself operates and how policy recommendations are developed within the Women in Digital Forum.
A working group, not a drafting exercise
Thematic Working Group 1 (TWG1) brings together experts to address gender gaps in the digital talent pipeline. It tries to answer the question of why fewer girls pursue ICT studies from school to the labour market, and at what stage they leave the pathway.
According to Huang, the group functions less as a committee drafting a document and more as a forum for aligning evidence. Members examine data from Eurostat, the Women in Digital Scoreboard, and evaluations of the Digital Education Action Plan to identify structural barriers and recurring trends.
One of the patterns that consistently emerged was that while girls engage strongly with digital skills in primary and lower secondary education, participation drops sharply between ages 16 and 19. At that stage, women account for only around 21–22% of students enrolled in ICT degree programmes. The group did not start from the concept of a “leaky pipeline” but arrived at it gradually as the term that best described the evidence. However, turning evidence into policy proposals requires a process of review designed to test whether recommendations are both credible and implementable.
How a recommendation endures the scrutiny of multiple experts
Each draft recommendation passed through review by researchers assessing logical coherence and evidence quality, education practitioners evaluating pedagogical feasibility, policy actors checking alignment with existing EU frameworks, and industry participants identifying implementation constraints. A formulation survived when it held up across all four perspectives.
The process culminated in the official closure meeting with DG CONNECT on 21 May 2026, where the full TWG1 portfolio, including the Policy Brief and the Classroom Evidence Lab, was submitted to the Commission. The discussion at that stage tried to identify which elements could realistically be embedded into the post-2027 Multi-annual Financial Framework, Horizon Europe, or the Digital Europe Programme. This process of scrutiny shifted how the challenge itself was understood, and what policy recommendations to make.
From participation numbers to system design
The most consequential reframing in TWG1 was abandoning the quest to increase intake by asking why the system filters talent out at specific transition points. Evidence from Lithuania showed ICT interest dropping sharply at university entry despite strong school-level engagement. In Sweden and Estonia, entry rates are stable, but attrition becomes visible at the career stage. The pipeline leaks differently depending on context, which means no single intervention addresses it.
TWG1’s final recommendations propose embedding gender responsiveness into system defaults rather than adding it to projects after the fact. A proposed EU-level Minimum Standard for Gender-Responsive Digital Education would translate that principle into curriculum requirements, teacher standards, and mandatory bias assessment in the procurement of AI-enabled educational tools. On funding, the group proposed requiring retention indicators as conditions for future EU programmes, shifting the measure from who enters a pathway to who stays, progresses, and leads. On monitoring, the Classroom Evidence Lab was proposed as a termly mechanism to generate micro-level evidence at the school level, alongside gender-lens extensions to the existing DigCompEdu and SELFIE frameworks, to capture the dimensions of participation that aggregate statistics miss. For Huang, this shift from individual choices to systemic design resonated strongly with themes she had already encountered in her own research.
What platform research and classroom research have in common
Huang’s contribution to TWG1 was shaped by a background in platform and gender data studies. What she found over ten months of working group discussions was that the structural logic of exclusion operates similarly in both contexts. On platforms, exit is rarely a defined action and more a process of reduced visibility and marginalisation through systems that appear neutral. In ICT classrooms, the same trajectory appears: a shift from active participation to observation, and eventually from presence in the pipeline to absence. The system defaults, may they be curriculum design, teacher feedback loops, peer signals or algorithmic tools, determine who the environment continues to feel inclusive for. By the time the drop-off becomes visible in aggregate data, the process of structural exclusion has long since stabilised.
That observation shaped the contribution Huang sought to make within the group. The argument she consistently advanced in TWG1 is that these are governance questions and that the burden of staying in a system should not fall on the individuals the system is failing.
