It is widely agreed on an European level that the industry needs and demands highly qualified people. The under-representation of women in technical and scientific professions and the insufficiency of vocational preparatory training in these areas are well known aspects. On June 3 1985, the Council and the Ministers for Education adopted a resolution proposing four general objectives and ten specific initiatives intended to achieve a better equality of opportunities between girls and boys, in the field of education (85/C166/01). One general objective of this resolution was pursued by a series of national projects progressively formulated during transnational and national meetings in 1986 : 'To encourage girls to participate as much as boys in new and expanding sectors, within both education and vocational training, such as the new information technologies and biotechnology." The general ideas of these projects were that boys' and girls' abilities are the same, but that their interest and their participation in scientific and technological matters, their experience, their confidence in their abilities differ, and that they have a prejudice as to the abilities of the other gender group and regarding some professions judged to be male or female. Hypotheses about the influence and the role of teachers, parents, guidance counsellors and other actors in the educational field in relation to boys' and girls' choices of scientific or technical school subjects or training were also part of the common framework. There was, however, no official agreement between those responsible for the projects on precise objectives, target populations, strategies for action or evaluation methodology, although the French proposal influenced the design of most projects. In other words, no text described the common aspects that the Member States were to adopt when submitting their project to the Commission. In 1988, application for the projects was to be sent to the Commission within the framework of another related European programme "New Information Technologies and Education", based on the resolution adopted by the Council and the Ministers for Education on September 19, 1983 (83/C256/1)). This resolution mentions a series of initiatives to be set up, one of which (No.l.iv) is devoted to "the participation of girls in school and educational activities related to new information technologies".
