NSE Group's edtech platform, TalentSprint, on Monday announced the launch of the third cohort of Women Engineers (WE) programme with the support of Google to address gender discrepancy in the tech industry. The third cohort, that targets at first year engineering students across India, has been scaled up to accommodate 500 participants and will be launched in May 2021.

The first two cohorts received 27,000 applications of which 220 were selected. Till date over 50 leading companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle and Accenture, among others have offered internships or job offers to these candidates at a compensation level 150% higher than the market median for entry-level engineers.

The applications for this programme will be open on March 1 and close on March 21,2021.

Stating on the programme, Shiv Venkataraman, VP, search ads, Google, said, "For tech to truly fulfil the promise of levelling the playing field and cresting universally relevant solutions, the representation of women in tech organisations is key. The success of previous cohorts has encouraged us to scale the programme further...”

Santanu Paul, co-founder and CEO, TaletSprint , said, “Since our inception, TalentSprint has run several path breaking initiatives to close the gender gap in the hi-tech sector... we just realise that this is the tip of the iceberg and a lot more can be and must be done to accelerate gender inclusion.”