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A DTI pilot scheme, overseen by Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for the Department of Trade and Industry, will provide business-based training and experience to help women SET (Science, Engineering and Technology) graduates return to work and catch up with developments missed whilst having children.
The DTI estimates that 50,000 women SET graduates are not working at any one time and of those who do return to work, only around 8,000 return to a job that makes use of their university education and training.
Miss Hewitt said: "Women have a vital role to play across the sciences in the UK and we need to reverse the trend of mothers not returning to jobs in their chosen academic field. This is crucial both for women's personal professional fulfilment and for the benefits they bring to scientific research and the UK economy.
"With women making up almost half the workforce, professional equality is not just a worthy principle anymore, it is a matter of economic necessity."
Miss Hewitt announced a £1 million fund for the UK technology and telecoms industry to tempt women into IT in January, but market conditions have meant finding work since then has been difficult.
Wendy John, a freelance Lotus notes messaging architect, had successfully completed three large projects over the last six years under her company, Morestar Computing Ltd, but has been out of work since January.
She said: "I called on all my contacts, polled all the agencies I'd done work for before, and chased all relevant roles advertised on web contract sites, but in nine months and following only about five interviews in that whole time, nothing.
"It came as a bit of a shock as I have never had to attend more than two interviews before being offered a role before last year."
Proving the old adage: 'it's not what you know, but who', Wendy said: "I'm now starting a backfill role for six weeks, arranged by a friend."
Women in IT
Although women make up almost half of the UK's overall workforce, only one in five people currently working in IT is female.
A report released last November entitled 'Women Participating in IT, Electronics & Communications Courses and Careers' confirmed that Britain lags way behind other developed countries such as America, Canada and Ireland in terms of numbers of female IT workers.
In the US, statistics show there are disproportionately small numbers of women in the computer industry and in academic computer science. According to the US Commerce Department, just 28.5 per cent of computer programmers are women.
In India, NASSCOM, the National Association of Software and Services Companies, puts the number of female IT workers at 38 per cent.
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Richard Powell, © Shout99.com 2002
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