Promoting Women in Austria: Finding the Right Support

Women’s advancement includes funding that strengthens equality in the labor market, facilitates access to STEM/IT and digital skills, supports female founders and entrepreneurs, and improves the compatibility of work and family life. Especially in times of skilled labor shortages and digital transformation, these funding opportunities are an important lever to enable more women to secure sustainable employment, advance professionally, or start their own businesses.

Funding is particularly relevant here because it lowers barriers that are often decisive in practice: costs for further training or retraining, time and resources for coaching, network building, project and consulting capacities within organizations, or accompanying measures that enable participation. Many programs also place greater emphasis on measurable impact (e.g., qualification certificates, job or start-up rates) and require gender mainstreaming as a criterion—even when the funding is not explicitly labeled as “women’s advancement.”

Depending on the project, different funding bodies may be relevant: for example, project funding from the federal government, states, and cities; labor market-related offers via the AMS; start-up and SME funding through aws; as well as EU channels such as ESF+ or Erasmus+ for educational and cooperation projects. Which funding is suitable depends largely on whether you are applying as an individual, company, or organization and whether your focus is on qualification, start-up, consulting, or social participation.

The Reflecta Funding Compass helps you find suitable women’s advancement and funding opportunities in Austria more quickly: with matching by target group and project, an overview of relevant funding logics, and support with application preparation. This way, you can take targeted next steps and keep deadlines in view.