FEPIC - Female Engineers Pushing Innovations in Companies has been funded within the E.U. "Lifelong Learning Programme". It started in October 2008 and will end in September 2010.

FEPIC relies upon two main keywords: creativity and leadership. Two words to focus on the person's professional potential to provide new directions and bottom-up changes. Creative thinking is crucial for innovation which in turn results in increased competitiveness. Different positive role models can be offered by female Leaders and can start a virtuous circle by attracting and networking female students and engineers in and along with long-term careers.

Creativity for innovation and leadership have been the themes on which all the partners have focused when collecting information from different sources and during a workshop in Bologna (April 2009) in order to build the e-learning tool. This tool will be the result of the collaboration among the 20 partners coming from universities, companies and associations located in Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, Sweden, United Kingdom. An active role will also be played by 63 female students, who will be involved in all phases of the project: from collecting information, to monitoring, to distribution and exploitation of results.

FEPIC aims at underlining creativity and leadership to tackle the persistent underrepresentation of women in top positions. The project fosters gender equality and an overall growth in transversal expertise by implementing an online training tool as an instrument of fair human resources development. The project intends to concentrate on the gender dimension in training and professional processes. By empowering high potential female engineers, the overall objective is to overcome the glass ceiling, that invisible barrier that too often stops women from achieving top positions.