Entrepreneur helping Women to get high-paying Tech Jobs

Through her company SheWork, entrepreneur Pooja Bangad is helping Indian women to get high-paying tech jobs after a career break.

After graduating from Pune University with a degree in computer science, Pooja worked for tech firm Cognizant in 2015.

She explained: “I was always good at academics. Algorithms were fun to me and piqued my interest.”

During this time, she saw a gap in the representation of women in mid and senior-level tech jobs.

Pooja and her university friend Tejas Kulkarni came together to create SheWork to help women resume their tech careers after a break.

Founded in 2019, SheWork is a shared employment platform that helps companies hire and deploy talent within 48 hours.

There are more than 20,000 talents on the website and around 80% are women.

Today, the startup hosts the likes of TechMahindra, Rebel Foods, Dell, TCS and others.

Pooja said: “There are just not enough women in mid and senior management roles.

“Women who are on sabbatical or have taken a break from their careers as they are getting married, expecting, shifting to some other place, find it really difficult to get back to work because of the lack of opportunities.

“The idea of starting this platform stemmed from here.

“We started this platform in 2019 with an idea to bridge this career gap among women professionals.

“Through SheWork, we enable companies to hire women employees. Women professionals have the flexibility to work remotely and choose projects that fit in with their personal and professional goals.”

Pooja explained that she wanted to create a flexible working environment for women.

“We wanted to create something more flexible and reliable for women.

“This concept gave birth to an ecosystem called SheWork, where women have complete flexibility in terms of location – they can choose to work remotely or onsite, they can choose the duration of the project they want to work on, etc.”

Explaining how SheWorks operates, Pooja told YourStory:

“Our platform lets companies hire specialist talent in a matter of hours by scheduling a meeting and planning the project on the go.

“Every member of the SheWork community is pre-vetted before entering the community.”

“At SheWork, we believe that a certain gender gap and prejudice still exists, and we are on a mission to disrupt the industry in this regard.”

SheWork endorses the concept of shared employment by promoting companies to hire more women and also helping various startups.

“This way, it’s a bilateral tool where you can share your ideal resources with companies who are looking and vice versa.”

While initial investment came from family and friends, SheWork has seen its team double in size as well as 30% growth quarter-on-quarter.

It now looks to expand to the United States.

Pooja urges women not to give up on opportunities.

“To run a company, one needs to recruit deserving women. We need to create an atmosphere at work where women can thrive.

“Also, increasing the participation of women and bringing about a balanced representation of women and men in all sectors will restructure everything.

“It is time to create a more women-friendly environment within companies.”