For The Women

For The Women creates impact through a FREE 14-week Data Science program we run for deserving women. Short term, we will use the cash prize to sponsor our next groups of scholars. On top of the current expenses we have for the program, the shift to online learning that the pandemic has ushered in calls for teacher training to make sure our transition to digital is optimized. Many of our teachers have had to quickly adapt and there is a lot of room to enhance the learning experience of the women through better teacher training. 

Beyond this, the mentorship, network and support that we would get from the MIT Solve group would be unparalleled and perfectly aligned with our long term plans of expanding our reach. We have honed in on Data Science as a future-proof career and this has taken us far but we believe that there are other fields we can tap into that our women can excel at such as Data Privacy. Finally, Using the Elevate Prize, we hope to have the resources to help us build a system that allows us to maintain our high touch model with our graduates at scale.

I’m Cara, a Filipino American who has reinvented herself multiple times. I graduated in history from Harvard University, then moved into Advertising followed by an MBA from SDA Bocconi in Italy. I now work in a Non Profit Organization, upskilling women in Data Science. I spent 22 years in Italy, meeting many Filipinas who had to leave their families for higher paying opportunities but never lost their strength and resilience. Although their sacrifices were admirable, they became part of a vicious cycle that tore families apart, produced a motherless generation and resulted in national talent loss.

The Philippine government encourages women to move abroad because it benefits the national economy but carries high social costs. I wanted to be part of the solution that finally broke this cycle. I turned to Education, with a definite path towards future-proof employment: Data Science. From this, For The Women was born. I am not a Data Scientist by profession, but what drives me is helping women find the lightbulb moment when they realize they can change their lives. My journey has helped me understand that if women who don’t have the resources are given the right opportunities, the sky’s the limit for them.

The IMD World Competitiveness Ranking 2018 says two major challenges in the Philippines relate to education: investment in human capital and increase in digital competitiveness. Women job-seekers are most vulnerable to these issues. Forty percent of the women in the labor force are in at-risk jobs, limiting income and future career opportunities. Metro Manila has a 1 million-plus person Business Processing Outsourcing industry where the challenge of job displacement due to Artificial Intelligence and the pandemic is already a reality. Working age Filipinas are thus left with threatened career futures, unless they can upskill themselves with “future proof” skills that provide higher paying opportunities. 

At For The Women, our mission is to empower Filipinas into higher paying, professionally mobile careers with Data Science upskilling as a vehicle in order to combat the threats the current landscape poses. FTW gives free scholarships to deserving women who demonstrate not only aptitude but more importantly great attitude. We support them through the career switch and they pay it forward through community-building with us. We have consistently seen data from employers saying they repeatedly hire from us not only for hard-skills but for attitude -- that’s why they love our graduates.

For The Women tackles a new way to elevate those who are traditionally left behind by offering a program to boost upward career mobility that is completely free, focused solely on women and builds an atmosphere of community that supports the women’s growth. While we do offer courses to upskill women on Data Science, what we’ve come to understand is the importance of going beyond the hard skills and diving deeper into the support women need when switching careers. We saw the need for additional structured reinforcement, leading us to design a program with a very strong soft skills portion coupled with hands on mentorship and community support. This is the heart of what makes us innovative because this is how women learn best. Anyone can take an online course but this does not consider the aspect of career switching that deals with confidence building. When we take a woman to the point that she’s ready to take her first bold leap into switching into a tech career, that is when she becomes a magic bullet of change. Her opportunities open up and her future career growth becomes attainable.

We are the epitome of providing the fishing rod, not the fish. After just 14 weeks of intensive hard and soft skills training, 80% of our women are able to find jobs and report an average increase of 138% on earnings which makes a big difference to their families. Because our metrics are very easily measured, we are able to see the level of impact we have on our graduates’ lives and on the economy; our graduates have contributed approximately $540,000 to the Philippine economy in their first year of new employment. We take qualitative data as well and see that 87.5% of the women who successfully switched careers report higher job satisfaction, making better employees for the companies that hire from us and more confident women able to move towards better lives. 

Our impact monitoring is a continuous process that follows our graduates as they move up in their careers. Data Science is a field that post-pandemic will continue to be in high demand, assuring us that our alumni will always have new or better opportunities to move up -- that upward trajectory is the exact impact we continue to strive towards as an organization.