WISE, the UK campaign for greater gender balance in science, technology and engineering (STEM), is urging employers to implement returner and retraining schemes to help close the STEM gender gap sooner. According to WISE, there are now over one million women working in core STEM roles, however, women represent only 16% of the IT profession.
“We have an enormous tech skills gap and with employers struggling to fill these roles, it’s time to do something different,” suggests Helen Wollaston, Chief Executive of WISE. “There is a huge untapped potential of women who have so much to bring to technology; communications skills, people skills, problem solving, and business experience. Creating opportunities through returner and retraining schemes for women to move into these roles offers a perfect solution and help to fill them quickly. If we scaled up these schemes across the UK, we could also speed up progress and close the gender gap sooner.”
POSITIVE INTERVENTIONS
According to WISE research, 45% of women on career breaks are interested in returner programmes and willing to retrain to acquire new technical skills. The WISE campaign is already seeing smart employers embrace this opportunity to run successful returner schemes. However, Wollaston wants more UK bosses to recognise the benefits not only for women, but for their businesses too.
WISE points to the BBC’s Step into Tech programme as a successful example. The part-time, three-month initiative provides training and a route into software engineering for women, with the overall aim of improving gender diversity in the BBC’s Design and Engineering division. The pilot programme kicked off in November 2018 and resulted in 11 female Associate Software Engineers working across the division after completion. Its second programme, which commenced in November 2019, received 23,000 applications, of which 8,000 were submitted for the 16 available places.
“It’s essential that organisations make positive interventions to take on the challenge of gender diversity within the technology sector,” says Sue Mosley, Programme Lead of BBC’s Step into Tech. “This programme has had such a positive impact and has been truly life changing for many of the students. All the women came from non-tech backgrounds and were drawn from a range of professions including teaching, law and customer services; the majority of them believed that there were no accessible routes for them to get into the sector.”
HIGH-CALIBRE CANDIDATES
Lloyds Banking Group has also been running a successful returner initiative for the last six years to support their goal of increasing representation of female senior leaders. The programme is open to anyone who has been on a career break for two or more years, and it has attracted a high calibre of both male and female applicants. To date, the Group has employed 95 returners and recently introduced a new technical and digital programme, which received around 400 applications for the 10 available roles.
“To achieve our goal of having more women at a senior level, we knew we had to do something different,” says Fiona Cannon, Group Responsible Business, Sustainability and Inclusion Director at Lloyds Banking Group. “Through our returners programme, our aim is to help women return to work at the same level as they had been prior to their career break.”
Click here for more information about the WISE campaign.
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