On February 25^th  2022, DATA SCIENCE partnership joined the Kick-Off Meeting of the DATA SCIENCE project, which is co-funded by the Erasmus Plus Programme of the European Commission, and brings together 7 Partners from 5 countries (Italy, Spain, Austria, Romania and Belgium). The KOM was held in online mode.

For some years already, a new strategic figure has been taking hold in the labour-market: the Data Scientist (DS), responsible for collecting, analyzing and interpreting extremely large amounts of data. Its role can be considered as an offshoot of several traditional technical roles, but the DS figure is specifically peculiar for combining both scientific competencies and human skills. In this sense, several research show how important data science skills are in humanities faculties – female-majority fields of study – even though most of these faculties do not include them yet in their curricula. As a result, it has been observed that the gender gap is still a relevant issue in DS labour-market.

The “Data Science in Human & Social Science for Women Empowerment” project therefore aims to take on this issue. Its objective is to promote a career in data science among women by introducing curricula in data science in the European Universities that are partnering in this project, to foster STEM disciplines and increase data science skills among female students.

During the meeting, the consortium as a whole discussed about the overall project implementation schedule, defining timelines and respective duties. During the first phase, partners will carry out a primary research on academic literature and case studies on the integration of data science in the humanities and social sciences, defining a set of basic skills and one of specific competencies. The results will help partners develop tailored training courses and tools to be uploaded on the DATA SCIENCE OER platform, along with other project’s outputs, news and contacts that will be available on the DATA SCIENCE project website for individual users, Universities, Higher Education Organisations and policy makers.