I think it’s fair to ask ‘Why does it matter that we achieve more gender equity
in tech?’.
Every study that’s ever been done has shown that the more gender equity you have in your
business, at the board level, at the C level, in your technology organizations, start up,
big company doesn't matter.
Doesn’t matter how you measure it.
The company does better.
Return on investment, return on invested capital, fewer bankruptcies, better profit margins,
so on and so forth.
So if you care about the profitability of your company, you should care about having
better gender equity amongst your ranks.
Secondly, we have a workforce issue in this country.
Today we are graduating 50% of the needed technology work force from U.S. colleges and
universities and the data shows that if we keep going at the rate we're going by 2026
we’re going to be graduating 17% of the needed tech workforce.
And I will simply assert that this is a math problem.
It's almost impossible to imagine how you can solve that problem if you leave half of
the available talent pool sitting on the sidelines.
In fact, there’s more than half the available talent pool because today 58% of the undergraduate
population are women and that number has been increasing over years.
Hard to know how we solve that work force problem if we don't get women off the sidelines
of the tech industry and into the workforce.
And so we asked ourselves well if the traditional doors into a tech internship are not open
for these young women, how do we create a new door?
And we created this program called a Winternship.
A Winternship is a 3-week paid internship, paid by the companies, in January between
first and second semesters for freshman and sophomore women in Tech related fields.
This is an experience that has a low barrier of entry to companies.
We send them in a small cohort of five, take them for 3 weeks, give them a great experience.
They work on a challenge project.
It's part philanthropy and part we’ll introduce you to an amazing new supply chain, but would
be transformational for the students.
Transformational in terms of their resume, juice if you will, but also in terms of them
having experience and the confidence of having worked in a large corporation.
So last year 60 companies participated in the WiTNY Winternship program.
You can see them all here.
Of course Cognizant was one of them.
Thank you very much for that.
And of course the question is were the results as transformational as we expected?
The proof is in the pudding.
In the last 2 years 740 CUNY [City University New York)\] women have worked as Wintrens
at those companies and their ability to land a summer tech internship went from under 5%
to 54%.
I want to point out that 80% of those opportunities were not at the host company where the student
did the Winternship, which means they were able to parlay that little three-week experience
into getting an interview and getting a summer internship job offer.
The other thing I want to raise is that retention in the major for those students went up from
12 to 24%.
Participating in this program attached them to the major in a way that no other program
has been shown to do.
And the question is why is that what's going on here?
Those women are learning some incredibly important lessons through programs like this.
They are learning how to be on a team and be great teammates, but not be deferential.
They are learning how to be competitive and not be petty.
And perhaps most importantly, they are learning how to be rocket boosters for all the women
around them while propelling themselves forward.
And so my question to you is ‘can you all find ways to be rocket boosters for all the
women around you while propelling yourself forward?’.