Eurostat survey shows that in 2017, men represented 84 percent out of 2.7 million people within the European Union who worked and who have education on information and communication technologies (ICT).
Among EU Member States, the country with the highest proportion of male employees with IT education was the Czech Republic (93 percent of IT specialists, followed by Hungary and Poland, both with 90 percent).
For a second consecutive year, Bulgaria is a pleasant exception among this statistic. Our country has the highest proportion of women working in the information and communication technology sector. About 66 percent of those working in this sector in Bulgaria were men.
The Bulgarian woman’s profile in the IT sector has changed dynamically over the last 5 years. IT is one of the most innovative and fast-growing sectors and the dynamics of work requires, above all, motivated and energetic people who are willing to develop and feel satisfied with what they are doing.
The ICT sector plays an increasingly important role in the EU economy and creates 120 000 jobs each year. However, projections are that by 2020 there will still be a shortage of over 900,000 qualified workers in the sector. The interest of women in the industry is against the background of a generally low representation of the tender gender in the information technology sector. They rarely choose to follow sector-related disciplines and therefore find it difficult to find a job in it.
A man up to 34 years of age, a graduate and working in a big computer company. This is the profile of the Bulgarian computer professional according to the analysis. Overall, 70 percent of those working in the sector in Bulgaria are between 18 and 34 years old. According to the data, nearly 98 percent of the native computer specialists have university education.
Last year, there were employees in each fifth enterprise in Bulgaria whose main task was to develop, manage or maintain IT systems and software applications.
According to Eurostat’s analysis, the IT specialists group in the EU has also registered the lowest unemployment rates for the last few years since the labour market for people with IT education has started to grow rapidly.
According to NSI data, salaries in the IT sector were highest across the entire spectrum of the labour market in Bulgaria – on average an annual salary in the private sector was 30,000 BGN, according to the statistics.
