The edtech platform and NSE Group company, TalentSprint launches the third cohort of Women Engineers Program (WE) with support from Google. TalentSprint WE was conceived in 2019 to address the gender disparity seen in the tech industry. Given the highly encouraging industry acceptance for previous cohort participants, the third cohort is being scaled up to accommodate 500 participants. The cohort is aimed at first year women engineering students across India and will commence from May 2021.

Despite the early role models, women professionals have lost ground in the technology sector and today represent a mere 26 percent of the global tech workforce. The TalentSprint WE program seeks to address this gender imbalance by selecting, training, and nurturing gifted women engineering students from across India, with diverse academic pedigrees and socio-economic backgrounds to fulfil their potential in the field of software engineering.

The first two cohorts received 27,000 applications, of which 220 participants were invited to join the program. Till date, more than 50 leading companies such as Google, Amazon, Flipkart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Accenture, Adobe, Capgemini, Oracle, Gojek, Mathworks, and others have extended prestigious internships or job offers to these participants, at compensation levels 150 percent higher than the market median for entry-level engineers. Admission to the third cohort will be through a rigorous multi-stage selection process, and students invited to join this cohort may receive partial or full financial aid, based on their merit and financial backgrounds.

Shiv Venkataraman, Vice President, Search Ads, at Google, said: "For tech to truly fulfil the promise of levelling the playing field and creating universally relevant solutions, the representation of women in tech organizations is key. The success of the previous cohorts has encouraged us to scale the program further and we are very happy to be extending support to TalentSprint to take this program to the next level."

Dr. Santanu Paul, Co-founder and CEO at TalentSprint, said: “Since our inception, TalentSprint has run several path-breaking initiatives to close the gender gap in the hi-tech sector. The TalentSprint WE program was conceived in collaboration with Google in 2019. The program has been growing from strength to strength in the last two years, and received overwhelming interest from industry, academia, and young women students both for its unique design and exceptional student outcomes. We realize this is just the tip of the iceberg and a lot more work can and must be done to accelerate gender inclusion. We are therefore delighted to deepen our partnership with Google and work with them to create a much bigger pipeline of young, world-class women software engineers this year.”