Women in Fiber Austria (WIFA)

Austrian’s male-dominated telecommunications and fiber optics industry

Women in Fiber Austria (WIFA) was established within the context of the Austrian telecommunications and fiber optics industry, a sector that is traditionally male-dominated. Despite a growing demand for skilled professionals, women remain significantly underrepresented, particularly in technical and leadership positions. Recognizing this gap, women within the Open Fiber Austria Association (OFAA) launched WIFA as a dedicated platform to address this imbalance.

Our key objectives are:
– Empowerment: To empower, strengthen, and support women currently working in or aspiring to join the telecommunications sector.
– Visibility: To increase the visibility of women in the industry, highlighting their contributions and creating accessible role models.
– Leadership: To actively dismantle structural barriers that hinder the progression of women into management and senior leadership roles.
– Networking: To build a strong, collaborative, and trustworthy network for knowledge sharing, peer support, and professional development under the motto #strongertogether.

Challenges 

The primary challenge is the systemic underrepresentation of women in Austria’s fiber and telecommunications industry. This links directly to our context of a male-dominated field and manifests in several specific ways:
– Lack of Visible Role Models: Women, and especially young women considering a technical career, have few female leaders and experts to look up to, which discourages them from entering or advancing in the industry.
– Barriers to Advancement: Women face invisible or structural hurdles when trying to advance into leadership positions. These are often rooted in traditional corporate cultures and unconscious biases.
– Professional Isolation: Women are often a minority within their teams and companies, leading to a sense of isolation and a lack of a supportive peer group to share experiences and challenges with.
– Limited Awareness: There is often a lack of awareness at the management level within companies about the specific challenges women face and the organizational benefits of greater gender diversity.

Solution

Our solution was the creation of Women in Fiber Austria (WIFA), a dedicated professional network and advocacy platform. Our approach is to build a community to directly address the identified challenges.
The core actions we follow are:
– Community Building: We organize regular networking events, including our “WIFA Ladies Circles,” workshops, lectures, and special events like the “LadiesNight,” to foster a strong sense of community and provide a platform for exchange.
– Empowerment & Skill Building: Through workshops and presentations by experts, we provide opportunities for professional development and upskilling.
– Creating Role Models: We actively promote the expertise of women in our network, giving them a platform to become visible role models for others.
– Advocacy: We engage with company leaders to make the promotion of women a strategic priority (“Chefsache”) and drive cultural change from within the industry. We also publish resources, such as the WIFA Whitepaper, to advocate for our goals.

Impact so far 

Since our founding, WIFA has achieved the following concrete outcomes:
– Established an Active Community: We have successfully built an engaged network for women across the Austrian fiber industry. The regularity of our events (e.g., having held over 18 “WIFA Circles”) is a quantitative indicator of a sustained and active community.
– Increased Visibility and Networking: Our events provide a concrete platform for hundreds of interactions, increasing the visibility of female professionals and creating valuable networking opportunities that did not exist before.
– Developed Key Resources: We have produced and published the “WIFA Whitepaper,” a concrete resource that consolidates our goals and expert knowledge, serving as an advocacy tool for the entire industry.
– Fostered Industry-Wide Collaboration: The WIFA core team consists of leading women from various key public and private companies in the Austrian telecom sector. This demonstrates a concrete, qualitative improvement in cross-company collaboration on the topic of gender equality.