Talent Sprint Announces Third Cohort of Women Engineers (WE) Program in Collaboration with Google

By: WE Staff | Monday, 1 March 2021

TalentSprinthas announced the launch of the third cohort of Women Engineers Program (WE). Launched in collaboration withGoogle, WE aims to counter the gender disparity problem prevalent in the tech industry. The two year program identifies and prepares first year women students to become globally competitive software engineers.

Initiated in 2019, the program has so far seen encouraging industry acceptance with several of the alumni being placed in coveted tech companies. Built on the positive outcomes of the previous two cohorts, the third cohort is being scaled up to accommodate 500 participants; the program will commence from May 2021.

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.

The ground reality is that women represent a meagre 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.

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.”

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."