Can 'returnships' help companies hire back millions of working moms?

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Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Pentagon reportedly delayed promoting female generals until Biden took office, a new venture fund plans to tap into the creator economy, and are ‘returnships’ an answer to women’s employment crisis? Have a great Thursday.

Today’s guest essay comes to us from Fortune senior writer Maria Aspan:

– Ready for re-entry? One of the many, many depressing things about the pandemic’s disastrous impact on working women is how predictable it should have been.

You can’t say that about most of 2020. But as I’ve reported on the employment crisis for U.S. women, fueled by the caregiving crisis among working mothers, I’ve heard the same refrain from senior executives, labor economists, and policy experts: “It’s a problem that’s existed for a long time,” Tami Forman, executive director of the nonprofit Path Forward, recently told me.

Maybe one solution has, too. Path Forward is one of several organizations and employers that provide return-to-work programs to people (usually women) who have dropped out of the workforce for years (usually because of childcare or other caregiving obligations). These “returnships,” which I wrote about for Fortune this week, pay workers to train on-the-job for several months and often lead to full-time employment in relatively well-paid corporate roles. For example, Path Forward, which works with employers including Walmart, Amazon, and Facebook, says that about 80% of those who go through its returnships “graduate” to a full-time job.

Returnships have been around for more than a decade, but a pandemic that’s forced more than 2.3 million women out of the labor force is renewing interest in them—from mothers who are hoping their Zoom schooling obligations end eventually and from companies that could use such programs to hire women back. IBM, for example, is widening eligibility for its internal returnships and told me that as of this month, it had seen a 167% increase in applications from a year earlier. (99% of participants in IBM’s returnships are women.)

Still, returnships face a huge supply and demand problem—and did long before the pandemic. To put it bluntly, employers just aren’t offering enough of them.

Last March, before the pandemic forced shutdowns, “I had thousands of women on an email list, hoping that my organization could find them a job,” Forman says. But Path Forward, which works with 85 employers, says that its clients have collectively hired only about 500 people over the past five years. And only a few thousand people at most are estimated to be enrolled in such programs every year—a blip next to the 5.3 million net jobs that women have lost in the COVID crisis so far.

It may take months or years for the pandemic’s complete toll on working women to be revealed—and it won’t be fully addressed without the sweeping policy changes my colleagues and I are continuing to report on. But in the interim, returnships and other employer-based programs provide some established examples of how large companies can support their female employees during the pandemic—and hire them back if and when it’s over.

After all, it’s going to take sustained effort, from all sides, to help women recover from this employment nightmare. As Forman warns, “women are going to get screwed by what’s happening right now, writ large.”

Read the full article here.

Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan

Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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