Girls and digital creativity: how teenagers are embracing technology in the EU

For Girls in ICT Day (24 April), Eurostat has published an analysis on digital skills among girls aged 16 to 19 across Europe. The 2023 results show a surprising trend: girls are more likely than the general adult population to have advanced digital skills, especially in the areas of creativity and multimedia.

Specifically, 78.6% of girls copied or moved files between folders, devices or in the cloud, 73.4% used text editors, and 67.7% created multimedia files combining text, images, tables, graphics, animations or sound. 60.8% edited photos, videos or audio files.

Proficiency in spreadsheets was demonstrated by 47.3%, and almost every fifth girl - 22.4% - used advanced functions in them to analyse and structure data. But when it comes to programming, the share drops sharply: only 9.9% of girls wrote code in a programming language, while among boys there were almost twice as many - 19.7%.

This gender gap in programming was recorded in 24 out of 26 EU countries that provided data. The most noticeable differences were observed in Austria (26.5 p.p.), Croatia (19.6 p.p.) and Belgium (18.2 p.p.). The exceptions were Lithuania and Greece, where female programmers outnumbered male programmers by 3.7 and 2.8 percentage points respectively.

And in four key activities - photo/video editing, word processing, complex file creation and file management - girls outperformed even their male peers.

These data illustrate one of the paradoxical sides of the digital divide: girls are actively involved in the creative use of technology, but are still less represented in the technical core - programming and development. This suggests the need for targeted programmes to engage girls in STEM skills, as well as a rethinking of ICT education strategies.