Plenty of initiatives to get more women into tech, but...

The Netherlands has no shortage of campaigns, guest lectures, networks and diversity programmes. What is missing is a continuous approach that guides girls from primary school to a technical degree programme, a first job and a workplace where they want to stay. As long as each organisation attempts to remove just one obstacle, the outcome will remain virtually unchanged: four to five men for every woman working in technology and IT.

The greatest gains will not come from yet another campaign, but from building a chain: early exposure, hands-on technical experience, gender-aware guidance, recognisable role models, an inclusive degree programme, a suitable internship, fair recruitment and, ultimately, the opportunity to work and progress in a safe workplace.

An initiative already exists in the Netherlands for almost every part of that chain. Some reach thousands of girls, while others try to change educational institutions or employers. Yet they are not sufficiently connected. Organisations often measure how many people attend an activity, but not whether a girl subsequently chooses a technical subject profile, completes a technical degree, enters a technical occupation and is still working there five years later.

The figures tell the story

The problem is clearly visible in the figures. In the second quarter of 2026, 1.386 million people in the Netherlands worked in a technical occupation and 589,000 worked in an ICT occupation. In both occupational groups, approximately eight out of ten workers are men. At the end of 2025, 229,000 women and 1.122 million men worked in technical occupations. In ICT, the figures were 109,000 women and 466,000 men.

The differences begin in education. In the 2024/2025 academic year, only 8.2 per cent of students in Dutch secondary vocational education, or mbo, studying technology and the built environment were women. Among first-year students in engineering, manufacturing and construction, women accounted for 27.7 per cent at universities of applied sciences and 30.8 per cent at research universities. Computer science is even more unevenly divided, with women accounting for just 14.3 per cent of first-year students at universities of applied sciences.

More talent is lost after graduation. In 2024, approximately 59 per cent of technically educated men worked in a technical occupation. Among technically educated women, that proportion was only 33 per cent. According to an analysis by VHTO, 65 per cent of women who do enter the sector after completing a technical education eventually leave the technical field. Among men, the figure is 42 per cent.

That does not mean the existing initiatives are pointless. On the contrary: without Girls’ Day, Techkwadraat, Fe+Male Tech Heroes and the efforts of educational institutions and employers, the problem would probably be even greater. But individually, they cannot remove every obstacle along the course.

1. Girls’ Day: an important spark, but not yet a career

Girls’ Day is probably the best-known Dutch programme introducing girls to technology and IT. Girls between the ages of ten and fifteen visit technical companies and institutions, meet female professionals and take part in programming, construction or experimentation activities themselves.

The programme is organised by VHTO, the Dutch expertise centre for gender diversity in science, technology, engineering and IT. In 2026, more than 10,500 girls participated, together with 299 companies and 238 schools. Afterwards, more than 26 per cent of the participants said they felt more confident about potentially working in technology or IT later in life.

That is a meaningful result. There is a substantial difference between reading a brochure about technology and programming a robot yourself, visiting a laboratory or speaking to a female engineer. Girls’ Day makes occupations tangible that, for many girls, lie outside their immediate frame of reference.

But one positive experience on a single day does not yet determine a subject choice. Years pass between a company visit at the age of twelve and the eventual decision about education and work. During those years, parents, classmates, teachers, textbooks and career-choice tests can repeatedly reinforce the idea that technology is primarily for boys.

Moreover, the Girls’ Day figures primarily concern reach and self-confidence immediately after the event. Publicly available long-term data showing how many participants subsequently choose a technical subject profile, enrol in a technical degree programme and begin a technical career are limited.

The logical next step is therefore not necessarily a bigger Girls’ Day, but a Girls’ Route: a programme in which the same girls return over several years for follow-up visits, mentoring, an internship and guidance in choosing their school subjects and further education.

2. Beeldenbrekers and Spiegelbeeld: role models challenging stereotypes

Through Beeldenbrekers, VHTO aims to show primary-school pupils that a programmer, architect, inventor or hydraulic engineer can also be a woman. Pupils first draw what they imagine someone working in a particular technical occupation looks like. A female professional then visits the classroom to explain what the work is really like.

Similar guest lectures are available for secondary schools. Through the Spiegelbeeld programme, VHTO has access to a network of more than 2,000 women working or studying in technology and IT who can serve as role models.

This approach addresses a fundamental mechanism. Children find it difficult to imagine becoming something when they never see anyone like themselves doing it. A female software developer standing in the classroom makes a greater impression than a general statement that technology is “for everyone”.

But there is also a risk that the intervention remains incidental. A volunteer giving one guest lecture a year has to compete with years of accumulated perceptions. Technical activities in school textbooks are still more often performed by men. Many children know a male mechanic, engineer or IT specialist in their own environment, but no woman working in such an occupation.

Role models are not a substitute for structural technology education either. An inspiring story has little impact when pupils are subsequently given few opportunities to build, design or programme themselves. The effect becomes stronger when a role model returns, supports a class during a practical project and remains available as a mentor.

3. Techkwadraat: technology for every child, but not automatically for every girl

Techkwadraat aims to make engineering and technology education much more widely available. Schools, companies, civil-society organisations and extracurricular providers work together in regional partnerships to introduce children between the ages of four and eighteen to technology.

The programme is funded by the Dutch ministries of Education, Culture and Science and Economic Affairs. A maximum of €129 million has been made available for the first funding period, which runs from 2025 to 2028. The approach ranges from young children learning through playful construction to secondary-school students exploring education and career options.

Techkwadraat’s strength is that it does not reserve technology for pupils who have already made their choice. Children who do not encounter tools, electronics or programming at home can develop technical skills and self-confidence through the programme.

But “for all children” does not automatically mean “with equal outcomes”. During a robotics exercise, boys may be quicker to grab the device while girls take responsibility for the presentation, potentially reinforcing existing roles. Without deliberate teaching methods, mixed task allocation and attention to stereotypical expectations, not all pupils benefit equally.

The regions are also responsible for a significant part of the monitoring. As a result, what is measured and the extent to which gender objectives are incorporated can differ between regions.

Techkwadraat can become a fundamental building block, but it must not limit itself to recording how many children receive technology education. The programme should also monitor who actually performs technical tasks during activities, how self-confidence develops and which subject and education choices participants make later.

4. Sterk Techniekonderwijs: regional infrastructure without firm national targets for girls

Sterk Techniekonderwijs, or Strong Technology Education, invests in technical education in the pre-vocational secondary, or vmbo, system. Schools and companies work together regionally on modern workshops, equipment, teachers, company visits and better progression into secondary vocational education.

The programme is funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and implemented regionally. During the 2025–2028 funding period, countering gender stereotyping and promoting inclusion have explicitly been included as social themes. Primary schools must also become more closely involved in the regional infrastructure for technical education.

That is important, because the differences are particularly extreme in vmbo. In the 2024/2025 academic year, approximately 85 per cent of pupils in the technical vmbo profile were boys.

Nevertheless, inclusion within Sterk Techniekonderwijs is primarily an area of attention, rather than a uniform national performance requirement. Regions can formulate their own ambitions. These are sometimes concrete, but can also be highly modest. An increase in the proportion of girls from 2 to 5 or 10 per cent may represent local progress, even though the programme still consists almost entirely of boys.

Sterk Techniekonderwijs also focuses predominantly on vmbo. Girls attending senior general secondary education, or havo, and pre-university education, or vwo, students in vocational and higher education and women who are already working all fall outside its central scope.

The programme is building valuable infrastructure. But that infrastructure will only produce more female technicians when schools are held accountable for girls’ enrolment, progression and study success—not only for the number of machines, partnerships and activities.

5. Gender Scans and better career guidance: a good diagnosis, but voluntary treatment

With its Gender Scan, VHTO examines where a school or technical degree programme creates invisible barriers. It looks at information materials, educational and career guidance, teaching methods, the curriculum, culture and social safety. The scan is available for secondary schools, vocational institutions, universities of applied sciences and research universities.

VHTO analyses documents and data and interviews pupils, students, teachers, management and support staff. After eight to ten weeks, the institution receives recommendations for improving the enrolment and retention of girls and women.

Such an analysis is necessary. The assumption that a degree programme is gender-neutral because men and women formally have equal access fails to take account of subtler barriers. Who appears in the photographs? Who operates the equipment during practical classes? How do teachers respond to sexist comments? Do girls and boys receive the same advice?

The answer to the last question cannot be taken for granted. In a VHTO experiment, education professionals were presented with a fictional pupil who was unsure about choosing a technical subject profile. When the pupil was named Thomas, the professionals gave positive advice about choosing technology almost twice as often as when the same pupil was named Anouk.

The limitation is that the scan is voluntary and implementation of its recommendations remains the institution’s responsibility. There is no requirement to publish the outcome, no minimum pace for improvement and usually no consequence when little has changed after several years.

The Gender Scan can identify exactly where things go wrong. But a diagnosis only changes an organisation when its leadership attaches a budget, responsibility, measurable objectives and a deadline to the results.

6. Fe+Male Tech Heroes: making women in tech impossible to ignore

Fe+Male Tech Heroes takes a different route. Its aim is not only to interest girls in technology, but to make women who already work in the sector visible, connect them and position them as a natural part of the technology world.

The initiative was founded at High Tech Campus Eindhoven in 2019. Its community now consists of more than 5,000 professionals and supporters. Fe+Male Tech Heroes organises conferences, meetups, role-model portraits and an awards show. The 2025 awards attracted almost 200 nominations, from which 28 finalists were selected.

The strategy revolves around visibility, connection and momentum. It does not only highlight successful women at the top, but also technical professionals, entrepreneurs, researchers, emerging talent, “hidden gems” and men who are committed allies. In doing so, Fe+Male Tech Heroes prevents gender diversity from becoming a conversation conducted exclusively among women.

Since the 2025–2026 season, the name has also featured prominently on the PSV Women shirt. Seven companies—Cisco, Driessen Groep, Heijmans, High Tech Campus Eindhoven, Mansveld Techniek, Simac and Tibo-Veen—jointly form the sponsorship collective. Eindhoven University of Technology and Summa support the programme. The agreement doubled PSV Women’s sponsorship revenue.

The shirt sponsorship is more than a logo exercise. Anyone attending a match, seeing a photograph of the team or encountering a child in a PSV shirt is presented with the combination of women, technology and elite sport as something entirely normal. A Fe+Male Tech Heroes fan zone was also set up around the PSV Women versus Ajax Women match in April 2026, where visitors could test their technical skills at the partners’ stands.

That normalisation is important. Technology is still too often communicated as a world of machines, abstract specifications and predominantly male experts. Fe+Male Tech Heroes turns it into a visible social network centred on ambition, collaboration and personal stories.

But visibility also has its limits. The community is strongly concentrated around the Brainport Eindhoven region and primarily reaches people who already have some connection to technology, companies or the region. A shirt can change perceptions, but it cannot independently prevent a girl from receiving negative advice about choosing a technical profile or a female engineer from being passed over for promotion.

The clearest publicly available results from Fe+Male Tech Heroes are currently the numbers of community members, participants and award nominations, as well as the visibility it generates. These are relevant indicators, but they do not yet prove that more women are entering technical roles or remaining in them for longer.

The initiative’s real power will emerge when its sponsor companies translate the public message into internal action: transparent figures on recruitment and departures, suitable employment conditions, objective promotion criteria, mentoring and concrete targets for technical positions. The PSV shirt will then be more than a symbol—it will become the visible face of demonstrable organisational change.

7. Women in Tech Netherlands: a powerful network that mainly reaches those already engaged

Women in Tech Netherlands is the Dutch chapter of an international movement that supports women in technology through events, mentoring, networking, training and advocacy. The Dutch chapter was launched in 2019 in collaboration with Elsevier and Amsterdam Data Science.

The international organisation has dozens of national chapters and offers mentors, vacancies, events and entrepreneurship programmes through its platform.

Professional networks are valuable in a sector where a woman is regularly the only female member of her team or department. They offer access to knowledge, examples, vacancies and contacts that can be more difficult to obtain through informal, predominantly male networks.

At the same time, such networks mainly attract women who already work or study in technology, or who regard themselves as potential tech professionals. A girl who has ruled out technology by the age of twelve is unlikely to find her way to them. The same applies to many practically educated women and career switchers who do not identify with English-language conferences or the label “women in tech”.

A network can improve the position of individual women. It cannot, however, force an employer to change how it recruits, pays and promotes people. The organisations in which its members work must change themselves.

8. Femme Tech and Female Impact: supporting women, but who needs to adapt?

From within the metals sector, OOM and Wij Techniek organise Femme Tech, an annual programme for women working in technical trades. Female Impact targets female entrepreneurs in technology. Participants attend workshops, exchange experiences, build networks and discuss subjects including job satisfaction, communication and personal development.

These programmes reach an important group that is often overlooked in diversity debates: women in practical technical occupations and in small and medium-sized technical companies. This is precisely where highly basic problems can arise, such as the absence of workwear designed for women, unsuitable changing facilities, inflexible schedules or a complete lack of female colleagues.

The meetings help women recognise shared experiences and support one another. This can prevent someone from concluding that a problem is entirely her own.

However, programmes of this kind also carry a risk. According to its own review, Femme Tech 2026 centred on the message that you cannot change the world around you, but you can change yourself.

Personal resilience and self-confidence are useful, but the figures do not point to a lack of adaptability among women. They point to prejudice, exclusion, limited flexibility and a workplace culture in which women do not always feel supported.

The answer cannot therefore primarily be to teach women to cope more effectively with an existing technical culture. Employers and managers must change that culture. Otherwise, women are merely being helped to endure an environment that itself escapes scrutiny.

9. Techniek Inclusief: employers finally come into view

Techniek Inclusief, or Inclusive Technology, shifts the focus from women to employers. The initiative was created by the Industry Coalition, comprising Bouwend Nederland, FME, Koninklijke Metaalunie, Techniek Nederland and WENB.

During an initial pilot, eleven companies worked on inclusive recruitment, employment conditions, retention, awareness and social safety in six thematic sessions. This resulted, among other things, in a toolkit containing recommendations on vacancy texts, objective selection, workplace facilities, pay, promotion and progress measurement.

A subsequent phase aimed to reach sixty companies in locations including Apeldoorn, Arnhem, Alkmaar, Rotterdam and Eindhoven. Techniek Inclusief functions as a learning network, with contributions from VHTO and industry associations.

This is one of the most promising initiatives because it does not ask how women can be “motivated” to enter technology, but what companies themselves need to change. The toolkit advises employers, for example, to monitor the proportion of women at every organisational level, investigate promotions and pay and check whether suitable toilets, changing rooms, workwear and breastfeeding facilities are available.

But sixty companies represent only a fraction of the Dutch technical sector. Participation is voluntary, the toolkit is not binding and companies are not required to publish their results.

Without sector-wide reporting, a company can call itself inclusive because it attended a meeting or altered a vacancy text. The real test is how many women are hired, what work they are given, how much they are paid and how many are still employed after three or five years.

10. Techniekroute: a new entry point, but not yet a route designed for women

Since 1 July 2026, jobseekers and career switchers have been able to use Techniekroute. The platform provides information on hundreds of occupations in construction, energy, installation technology, metals, the electrical and mechanical engineering industries and mobility. Candidates can also receive free support from a regional coach and explore work-and-learn programmes.

Techniekroute is backed by six technical sectors, industry associations, trade unions, training and development funds, the government and regional partners within the Construction, Energy and Technology Action Plan. The first services were launched in Drenthe, Friesland, Groningen, Zeeland and South Holland and are intended to be rolled out further across the Netherlands.

Techniekroute addresses a genuine problem. People seeking to move into technology later in life are often confronted with a maze of regional projects, funding schemes, degree programmes and service desks. A single recognisable entry point can lower that barrier.

But the programme has not been designed specifically for women. As a result, barriers such as loss of income during training, childcare, part-time options, safe internships and suitable company cultures may remain out of view. Techniekroute also offers no employment guarantee, and training is not fully funded in every case.

Because the initiative only began in July 2026, no results are yet available on recruitment and long-term retention. The route will only become genuinely relevant to gender diversity when it monitors how many women register, where they drop out, which programmes they follow and how many are still working in a technical occupation several years later.

11. The Irène Curie Fellowship programme: proof that decisive intervention works—on a limited scale

Eindhoven University of Technology chose a much more direct intervention in 2019. Under the Irène Curie Fellowship programme, academic vacancies were initially opened exclusively to women for a specified period. New fellows also received funding for their research and professional support.

Following a ruling by the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, the programme was modified. The revised preferential policy could be applied in job categories in which women accounted for less than 30 per cent of employees.

The programme produced demonstrable results. By 2024, women accounted for almost 30 per cent of permanent academic staff at Eindhoven University of Technology. This meant that the programme’s original main objective had almost been achieved. The university combines the recruitment policy with the Women in Science Eindhoven network, mentoring and career development.

The difference from many other initiatives is clear: Eindhoven University of Technology did not limit itself to communication or awareness, but changed the procedure through which positions were allocated. That made the programme controversial, but also measurably effective.

Even this example, however, cannot close the national gap on its own. It covers a small, highly educated academic occupational group. It says little about female mechanics, operators, installers, vocational students or career switchers. Moreover, a higher proportion of female academics does not automatically remove the barriers faced by students and technical support staff.

The principal lesson is therefore not that every employer should introduce an identical preferential policy. The lesson is that the figures only change substantially when organisations are willing to alter the mechanisms through which positions and opportunities are distributed. Non-binding ambitions achieve less than concrete objectives, accountable leaders and a procedure that demonstrably produces different outcomes.

Not more initiatives, but a system that connects them

Together, the eleven initiatives—and the list is undoubtedly incomplete—cover almost the entire journey: from a child’s first technical experience in primary school to professional networks, career switching, employment practices and academic appointments. Their weakness is not that they are all doing the wrong things. The problem is that each initiative only controls one part of the route.

A girl can participate in Girls’ Day, but subsequently receive negative advice at school about choosing a technical subject profile. A degree programme can recruit more women, but still treat them as exceptions during practical classes and internships. An employer can write inclusive vacancy texts, but lose women through inflexible schedules, unequal promotion opportunities or an unsafe culture. A network can support women, but cannot force their employers to act on their experiences.

The Netherlands therefore needs a shared system in which education, government and industry assume responsibility for successive stages. Every introductory activity must offer a follow-up route. Every technical degree programme should publish gender-specific figures on enrolment, dropout rates, internships and progression into employment. Employers should report not only their overall proportion of female employees, but also women’s representation in technical positions, training, promotions and departures.

Public funding and participation in prominent campaigns could subsequently be linked to demonstrable results. A company that associates itself with Fe+Male Tech Heroes, Girls’ Day or Techniek Inclusief could, for example, report annually on what has changed internally. The aim would not be to punish participants for a problem that has developed over decades, but to make visible which approaches genuinely work.

The PSV Women shirt sponsorship demonstrates the symbolic power that can be created when organisations act together. A girl watching the team should come to regard women’s participation in both elite sport and technology as normal. But normalisation will only be complete when she no longer has to be the only woman in her technical class, team or boardroom later in life.

The Netherlands does not need to start from scratch. The building blocks already exist. They simply need to be assembled into a route on which girls and women are not repeatedly required to overcome the next obstacle on their own.