The similar patterns of German and Greek ICT usage, education and careers of women and men, and the fact that women are still lagging behind, support the necessity of promoting equality in the field of ICT. A starting point would be raising the self-confidence of girls, and taking into account the facilitating role of teachers in this respect.
Such facilitation is, however, linked with school curricula and their implementation of media education, basic education in information technology, and informatics lessons at school. These subjects and related frameworks have to be an indispensible part of the curricula in Germany and Greece. However, gender support is not yet an underlying principle of the curricula of these subjects, and, if at all, specific gender support in relation to ICT is implemented on project level only (see Helling & Ertl, 2009; Kikis-Papadakis, Papanastasiou, & Margetousaki, 2009). For example, in Germany, several initiatives and projects aim to attract females to study STEM subjects, e. g. information days for pupils, information services for women at university, and special studies for women only (Studien — & Berufswahl, n. d.; www. komm-mach-mint. de). Therefore, future development of education policy at school level has to take into account both the consistent implementation of information technology education and at the same time the specific facilitation of girls and boys towards an increase and equal development of their digital literacy.
A major problem in this context is often the inadequate education ofteachers. Although teacher education and training include aspects of media education and information technology education, only a small number of teachers have the competencies to adequately implement ICT in education and facilitate pupils’ digital literacy (see Helling & Ertl, 2009; Kikis-Papadakis, Papanastasiou, & Margetousaki, 2009).
Future education policy development needs to deal with this challenge by ensuring the competence development of all teachers in this respect. Furthermore, the development of gender-sensitive teaching and learning materials for the facilitation of digital literacy of girls and boys needs to be advanced. Even if there are several initiatives and projects that focus on the promotion of ICT and gender issues, the described statistics and studies show that the issue of promoting equality with respect to gender and ICT will remain a critical topic in the future for both countries, and needs to be advanced from a project-based approach to a policy implementation level.
To sum up, the situation in both countries with respect to gender and ICT is still far from gender balanced. Statistics about ICT use of teenagers indicates that there may be a change. However, this has to be supported to affect the uptake of ICT careers by females positively.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Parts ofthis contribution were funded by EU (LLP — Program, Projects PREDIL 141967-2008-LLP — GR-COMENIUS-CMP and SESTEM 505437-llp- 2009-GR-KA1-KA1SCR), DAAD and IKY (Project D0813016 resp. Agreement number 136 IKYDA 2009: Comparative study on gender differences in technology enhanced and computer science learning: Promoting equity).