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adesso initiative: Women in IT professions! adesso and Martina Voss-Tecklenburg agree on partnership

What do IT and football have in common? They often have to deal with similar stereotypes, and women are under-represented in both fields. adesso wants to change this in the future and inspire more women to become computer scientists, IT consultants and information technology managers. To help achieve this, the software service provider has brought a prominent advocate and supporter on board: Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, coach of the Germany women’s national football team.

adesso was able to attract Martina Voss-Tecklenburg (51), coach of the Germany women’s national football team, to join its “Women in IT professions!” initiative. Together they plan to increase the number of women in IT professions over the next few years. Whether it is IT or football, the statistics are often still the same these days: both fields are dominated by men; women software developers and IT consultants are still the exception.

adesso is working to tackle this at an early stage by introducing young women to IT subjects during the vocational orientation phase. An example of this commitment is the experimental IT4Kids workshop series, where adesso helps girls and boys up to the age of 14 learn about IT topics in equal measure.


Working together now for the adesso initiative "Women in IT Professions! Dirk Pothen, member of the board of adesso, and Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, national coach of the women's national soccer team.

Helping adesso in its work to recruit women for expert and management positions in IT is a matter close to the coach’s heart: “I want to use my experience to give women the courage to live their strengths, even if it means choosing less traditional training routes. I myself learnt that it is worth it.”

Currently, around 16 percent of all software engineers and IT consultants at adesso are women. This number almost corresponds to the percentage of women in professional IT roles throughout Germany (17 percent, source: BITKOM), but adesso would still like to continually work to increase this amount and hire more women for management positions in future Volker Gruhn is Supervisory Board Chairman, founder of adesso and professor for software technology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is familiar with this situation in his day-to-day work at the university. “Overall, women are still under-represented in information technology, but that number is growing. We want to actively support this trend and target women with our range of options. Studies show that mixed-gender teams are more motivated, more creative and perform better. They develop a better understanding of the needs of our customers, both male and female.”

To attract women to join the company and better support them in their work-life balance, adesso has put together a compact package of measures. These actions range from school sponsorship and direct communications to target groups at universities and at trade fairs, company tours for students, internal company mentoring programmes and women’s networks through to targeted family-friendly measures. These include, among other things, providing parent-child offices at adesso locations, entitlement to part-time working hours and extended child sickness allowance.

For national coach, Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, these steps are exactly what is needed: “It would please me greatly to assist adesso with this initiative in the near future.”

They have already enjoyed the first fruits of their partnership: Martina Voss-Tecklenburg will take part as a guest speaker at this year’s adesso digital day on the subject of artificial intelligence. The event will take place on 10 July 2019 at Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion football stadium – three days after the Women’s World Cup final on 7 July in Lyons.


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