How Returnships Help Women in Tech Return to the Workforce

Mashable
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How Returnships Help Women in Tech Return to the Workforce-giving compass

Giving Compass’ Take:

• Asha Vade reports that returnships are helping parents enter back into the workforce by offering training programs and skill-building to reacquaint them with what they’ve missed. 

• How can philanthropists partner with businesses to make workforce re-entry programs more prolific? Can businesses start to provide training directly?

• This video series follows top women in technology jobs and highlights their growing presence in tech. 

I had made the decision to leave my technical project manager position in order to better support my family.  I knew I didn’t want to lose the best years with my child, who now needed me to be present in the moment, to be engaged, to have energy. But when I made the difficult decision to take a break, I never imagined that my career wouldn’t be waiting for me when I was ready to return.

As I hit the pause button on my professional life, I planned to return to work when the time was right. But once I started my job hunt, I realized I had a harder road ahead of me.

Many working parents face re-entry issues, but the challenge can be more pronounced in the tech industry. According to research by AnitaB.org and the Michelle R. Clayman Institute, “the mid-level is perhaps the most critical juncture for women on the technical career ladder because it is here that a complex set of gender barriers converge.”

The pipeline for women in technology to senior-level roles has a leak. Many companies are taking an innovative approach to supporting women in the workplace, especially women in the technology industry, through a new kind of initiative: “returnships.”

Returnships are a type of internship program that provides a way for organizations to recruit and on-board mid-career men and women who have taken a break in their careers and want to re-enter the workforce.  The nice part of returnships? You’re not starting at the bottom of your career all over again; instead, your skills and past experience are recognized as a part of the program for you to build from.

Read the full article about returnships by Asha Vade at Mashable. 

If you are looking for more articles and resources for Poverty, take a look at these Giving Compass selections related to impact giving and Poverty.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    Strengthening Children’s Math Skills with Enhanced Instruction

    Early math skills are a strong predictor of later achievement for young children, not only in math, but in other domains as well. Exhibiting strong math skills in elementary school is predictive of later high school completion and college attendance. To that end, the Making Pre-K Count and High 5s studies set out to rigorously assess whether providing high-quality math instruction, aligned across prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten, could lead to long-term gains across a variety of domains for students growing up in low-income communities in New York City. Key Findings: Making Pre-K Count: At the end of kindergarten, there was a small, positive, but not consistently statistically significant effect for the Making Pre-K Count program on one of two measures of math skills, a measure that is more sensitive to children’s skill levels than the more global test used in pre-K and kindergarten. Making Pre-K Count led to positive impacts on children’s attitudes toward math at the end of kindergarten and to about two months’ greater growth in kindergartners’ working memory skills. Making Pre-K Count plus High 5s kindergarten supplement: Two years of aligned, enhanced math experiences led to positive impacts on the more sensitive measure of children’s math skills, both above and beyond Making Pre-K Count alone (equivalent to 2.5 months’ growth) and compared with no math enrichment in pre-K and kindergarten (equivalent to 4.2 months’ growth); effects were positive but not statistically significant on the more global measure. The effect of two years of enhanced math translates into closing more than a quarter of the achievement gap between low-income children and their higher-income peers at the end of kindergarten. Children who were offered two years of math enrichment also had more positive attitudes toward math than children with no enrichment.

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