IBM Helping Women Re-Enter the Tech World

Fifty-two percent of women in science, tech, engineering and math quit their jobs mid-career. This happens for a variety of reasons, ranging from workplace culture to family responsibilities.

A new IBM program is helping to bring them back by restoring lost confidence and teaching new job skills.

Why Women Leave, and Why Coming Back Is Hard

The 52 percent figure comes from a 2008 Harvard Business Review study, and it’s still widely cited. According to CNET’s reporting on the program, the study found that leaving was most common when women were in their mid- to late thirties, and that family responsibilities tend to fall disproportionately on women.

Many of those women haven’t given up on tech for good. The problem comes when they’ve been away for several years, or a decade, and want to rejoin. A software developer with ten years of experience may come back to find languages and tools they’ve never used. And as CNET put it, confidence is an issue on both sides: an employer might doubt that a candidate can do the job, and the candidate might doubt it too.

How the IBM Program Works

The IBM Tech Re-Entry Program is a challenging 12-week internship for experienced technologists who are returning to work after an extended time away. Interns get the chance to work on high-level projects with a senior-level mentor.

According to CNET, the internship starts with a three-day orientation, followed by a placement in one of IBM’s businesses. Participants work on an actual project, in areas such as data analytics or programming. The idea is to give returners a smooth way back, get them up to speed, and give managers a chance to see their work before hiring them.

In an interview with CNET, Jennifer Howland, executive of IBM’s Pathways Program, said the program helps make women returning to the tech world more employable.

“Most employers don’t look kindly on the fact that someone has not been doing work and someone has taken a career break for 15 to 20 years,” she said.

IBM worked on the program with iRelaunch, a career reentry firm led by Carol Fishman Cohen. At the time of CNET’s story, the program was on its third group of interns and had graduated more than 30 people. Howland also pointed to a business reason for it. “There is a very known, severe shortage of diverse technical talent in the IT industry around the world,” she said. “We can’t sit back and wait for diverse technical talent to come find us.”

Who Else Is Doing It

IBM isn’t the first company to help bring women back into the fold. Several companies in the financial sector—like Goldman Sachs, MetLife, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley—have rolled out similar programs.

Cohen told CNET that these programs first came out of the financial sector, with Goldman Sachs launching its program in 2008. In tech, iRelaunch has worked with companies like Intel and General Motors through a career reentry initiative it co-leads with the Society of Women Engineers. PayPal has also run an internship program for women restarting their careers, in partnership with a nonprofit called Path Forward.

What Happened Next

IBM’s program grew well beyond its first few cohorts. By 2021, CIO reported that the Tech Re-Entry Program, launched in 2016 in the US and Canada, had expanded to China, India, Brazil, Singapore, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The format changed too. CIO described it as a paid “returnship” that typically ran for six months, with some tracks, such as data science, taking 12 months. It focused on roles like software developer, data scientist, technical project manager and client success manager. A job wasn’t guaranteed, but CIO reported that the majority of participants were offered a full-time role at IBM when they finished.

The word “returnship” itself has become a common term for this kind of program: a paid, fixed-term placement aimed at people coming back after a career break, with a path to a permanent job.

What It Means for Employers

Return-to-work programs tackle a problem that ordinary hiring tends to miss. A résumé with a ten-year gap often gets screened out before anyone looks at what the person can actually do. A structured placement swaps that guesswork for a few months of real work, which gives both sides the evidence they need.

For tech companies that say they can’t find enough experienced, diverse talent, it’s a pool that’s easy to overlook. These are people who already have technical training and years of experience. Sometimes all they need is a way back in.