To promote equal opportunities for women and men in a changing economy . Recipe n.32   COMETT and WiTEC, 1988-1995 What Originally, the COMETT programme was created to improve European competitiveness by developing advanced training initiatives. Universities and industry should co-operate in training in the field of technology. Enterprise training partnerships, students placements abroad and training co-operation projects were established. But as the huge majority of participants was male, one of the partners, WiTEC, decided to focus especially on the needs of women in technology. WiTEC's aims were to increase the number of girls and women taking up studies and careers in science, engineering and technology, to offer those women support and assistance and to generate action programmes and new training initiatives. One important tool WiTEC employs is organizing student placements for female students in the male dominated fields of engineering, computing and management. How much For the student placements, the national WiTEC partners received financial support from COMETT in the eginning and later on from the Leonardo da Vinci programme. How In Sweden, as an example, the interst in the WiTEc placements was enormous. Around 200 young Swedish women have been on placements all over Europé. The placements had a duration of 3 to 12 months and all the participating women were between 20 and 30 years of age. The interested students had to complete an application form and to send it, together with a CV, to interested companies. The time spent abroad offered them the possibility to get a much better insight into working life and experience working for a longer period of time. WiTEC demanded a written report from every student who had been on a placement in order to make the participants reflect upon their experiences and especially upon the question of equal opportunities. Why Only a low percentage of women entering university choose the fields of science and technology and even fewer women can be found in industrial or other positions, where they could influence the technological development. Therefore, a great amount of skill and intellectual capacity is lost for the development in industry as well as in society. It is of high priority to raise the awareness of the unequal conditions of men and women and to draw the young women's, the managers' and the work-mates' attention to this topic in order to change the gender imbalance in industry. Results The students placement programme has been highgly successful. In Sweden, 200 young women have been on a placement abroad since 1991 and most of them reported that they had a very enriching time. Even though some of the participants had to cope with difficult conditions, all of them regarded the gained experiences as valuable and that they learned a lot. References for further informazion: Agneta Hansson, Centre for Working life Research and Development, Halmstad University, Box 823, 301 18 Halmstad, Sweden