When three years ago, Microsoft established Codess, it was a way to promote gender diversity in software engineering. Today, this global community for female coders helps women achieve their professional goals through worldwide networking events, mentoring and support, whilst exposing the opportunities that Microsoft has to offer.

"Microsoft Malta has always been at the forefront in the promotion of gender equality especially in a local IT sector that is still very predominantly a male-dominated one," says Angela Micallef from Microsoft Malta.

Microsoft Malta this year decided to celebrate International Women's Day by supporting local non-profit organisation BPW Careers Day which was attended by 800 Form 4 female students.

During this event, Angela Micallef, Jacqueline Harvey and Carlota Rodriguez from Microsoft Malta attended the event as business mentors, met the students and shared their life and work experience with them whilst giving them general career guidance.

"However, we are not interested in just promoting gender equality. Stopping at that reduces this important topic to a simple exercise in making sure the numbers match. We are not here to honour some obligation. Our commitment at Microsoft Malta is to make sure that females realize their true potential in IT and to change the common misconception that IT is only a sector for men," said Angela Micallef.

Minister for Education Hon Evarist Bartolo said "The numbers for both girls and boys are not good enough in terms of uptake in ICT and other science subjects. The skill-set that these subjects create are crucial in a modern economy and schools have invested considerably in taking classes into the 21st century. It is important to understand that technology plays an important role not just in the subject itself, but also in other subjects like mathematics and languages. From an early age, in primary schools, we are introducing basic programming techniques such as logic through games in order for students to understand the basic concepts of ICT without the heavy burden of programming languages at an early age."

Angela Micallef added "for many years, we have been witnessing an 'ICT gender gap'. Whereas the ICT industry contributes an average of 5% to the national GDP - one of the highest rates in the EU - on average only one in three of our ICT graduates are females, while just over one third of the gainfully employed in ICT are females. This gender gap needs to be bridged in order to strengthen the country's ICT industry and offer more job opportunities to the increasing amount of female students who would like to pursue a career in IT. One way of bridging this is by making ICT more attractive to our youths, especially to our young female students."

"We want to use these events to show that contrary to the common misconception, ICT offers a lot of the flexibility that is necessary. We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly connected. Microsoft understands this and all our employees enjoy all the necessary flexibility that enables them to work productively and effectively," concluded Angela Micallef.

Every year, Microsoft hosts events at its Microsoft Innovation Center where it meets students and listens to their ideas and learns more about the aspirations.