Supporting more women to return to work this IWD

International Women’s Day is a chance to celebrate the contributions, big and small, that women make to today’s society.

While we should absolutely spend time highlighting and praising these contributions, it’s also a time to have serious conversations about a burden that many women bear—the career break penalty.

It will not shock many people to know that nearly 24% of women aged 16 to 64 are economically inactive. That gap is largely driven by caring responsibilities. But when those women are ready to return to work, they find their way blocked by bias in the recruitment system and AI filters putting their applications to the back of the queue. These challenges, alongside a lack of flexibility in roles, rising childcare costs and poor support when they get into work, mean women are giving up their professional roles. In fact, the Career after Babies report in 2023 said that 85% of mothers leave full-time work within three years.

This is a complete waste of talent and skills. For STEM industries, where there are skills gaps across most sectors, there are thousands of women who have the knowledge, expertise and passion to fill those gaps but are overlooked.

For the past six years, we have been monitoring and assessing the returner landscape within engineering through our annual survey – the STEM Returners Index. There have been shoots of positivity over that time, but our latest results painted a worrying picture. Overall, 75% of respondents said they were finding the return-to-work process difficult or very difficult (39% and 36% respectively), higher than in 2022 (65%) when the country was getting back to normal after the pandemic.

Among our female respondents in the 2025 Index, over three -quarters (79%) of women said they were finding the return-to-work process difficult or very difficult, up from 69% in 2024. More than a quarter (28%) said they experienced bias against their gender compared to 4% of men, an increase from 26% in 2024, while 39% of women said they had experienced bias against their age and 62% said they had experienced bias against a lack of recent experience.

Women continue to report childcare as the leading driver of a career break with over half of women (54%) saying they stepped away due to childcare responsibilities, compared to 9% of men, up from 51% in 2024.

These struggles are having an impact on people’s self-worth – 73% said the challenges of trying to return to work were damaging their self-confidence and many are considering career opportunities away from STEM.

For an industry that needs 124,000 new engineers and technicians annually to meet demand, this is a complete waste of talent. So why aren’t we doing more to help and support these women back to work?

This IWD, we are imploring STEM organisations to not only do more to combat recruitment bias within recruitment processes to help people return to work, but to offer something more tangible at the same time. Returner programmes that place people into real roles are desperately needed to ensure people return to work and are retained. There are many mentoring and career coaching programmes available but few that result in a job for the individual. Instead, they rely on that individual to take the learnings and keep applying for positions on their own and after you’ve done that a hundred times, it’s safe to say the enthusiasm understandably wavers.

But a programme that allows a candidate to reintegrate back into the industry, with an option to become permanent, provides a route to return to work for the candidate and allows the organisation to gain a skilled employee looking to prove themselves. These programmes are proving popular with returners themselves.

In the 2025 Index, 68% of successful returners expressed a preference for these programmes and supported Returner programmes were credited by more respondents than any other route back into employment (23%). This places structured returner pathways ahead of job search websites, employer websites, and traditional recruitment agencies.

We have a long way to go, but by actively supporting returners through structured employment pathways, we can help break down the barriers that keep skilled professionals, particularly women, from re-entering the workforce. Returners aren’t asking for special treatment. They’re asking for a fair chance.

The future of our workforce and the drive to recruit thousands of people every year won’t be successful by only targeting new talent. To have any chance of filling the gaps, we must engage with experienced professionals who are ready to return. A career break does not mean a career has ended; in fact, it is the opposite – it is the start of a new journey.