Alexandra Samuel | The Verge

Welcome to Blaine, the town Amazon Prime built

2018-06-20T12:58:37-04:00

Roll off the highway into Blaine, Washington, and the first thing you’ll notice is Edaleen Dairy; on a summer day, a dozen people might be lined up outside waiting for ice cream. Across the street from Edaleen is 5D Packages and its competitor Mail Boxes Plus. Turn onto H Street, which passes for a main drag, and before you hit the US Post Office, you’ll spot 24/7 Parcel, Border Mailbox, and Security Mail services. Take a right at the post office and loop back around to Peace Portal, and you’ll also find Blaine Enterprises, Pulse Packages, and Hagen’s mail pickup.

That may seem like a lot of mailbox stores for a town of 5,000 people, but Blaine isn’t just any small town: it sits right on the 49th parallel that divides the United States and Canada. As the only US border town located in the shadow of a major Canadian city, Blaine’s economy is uniquely dependent on the relationship between the two countries. It’s a position that also leaves the town vulnerable to the vagaries of e-commerce trends and exchange rates. That vulnerability has only been exacerbated by mounting tension between Washington, DC and Ottawa, an emerging trade war, and the looming threat of a boycott.

For these Canadians, Blaine is simply a mailing address: the nearest, cheapest, and most convenient way to order packages from Amazon

For the past decade Blaine has flourished, thanks to the discrepancy between the explosion of e-commerce in the US and the still-developing e-commerce network in Canada. Blaine’s handful of residents have grown accustomed to a regular stream of Canadians who come to town specifically to pick up their US packages. For these Canadians, Blaine is simply a mailing address: the nearest, cheapest, and most convenient way to order packages from Amazon and other major US retailers.

But as Amazon continues to step up its Canadian operations and a growing number of American (and Canadian) retailers have made it easier to ship to Canada, Canadians are no longer as dependent on their US mailing addresses. Between economics and politics, Blaine will soon be forced to reckon with an uncomfortable question: is there a future for the town if it no longer serves as Canada’s front porch?

It wasn’t too long ago that Blaine boasted only a handful of mailbox options. Then came the dawn of online shopping. As e-commerce operations for major US retailers like Macy’s, J.Crew, and Best Buy took off in the early 2000s, they tempted Canadian shoppers who were already familiar with the brands. Although Amazon hung out a shingle in Canada in 2002, its operations were initially limited by regulations intended to protect Canadian publishing. While Amazon.com expanded into more product categories, Amazon.ca contained only a tiny fraction of its US offerings well into the 2000s. And Canadian retailers were in no rush to match the e-commerce boom of the US: imagine selling to a population the size of California’s, but shipping products across the entire land mass of the United States. (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.)

As a result, Canada’s armchair shoppers were left to drool over the online offerings of retailers to the south — many of which, if they could be delivered to Canada at all, arrived with an unpredictable bill for shipping, taxes, and / or customs duties. Just as US e-commerce was taking off, the Canadian dollar went through one of its rare periods of strength (even surpassing the US dollar at various points in 2011–2012), making it that much easier for Canadians to shop in US dollars. No wonder Canadians close to the US border soon opted to ship directly to the States: the selection was larger, shipping was cheap or free, and customs duties were often nonexistent (depending on your honesty at the border and on the moods of the border agents).

I’m one of those cross-border e-shoppers. As a dual citizen who has spent many years living on each side of the border, my Blaine mailbox, Trader Joe’s, and Target runs have allowed me to scratch my American retail itch even after settling in Vancouver. My family set up our Blaine mailbox in 2010, and we now make monthly pilgrimages to pick up such elusive goodies as Hanna Andersson’s kid clothes (cheaper to ship to the US), a round of Rent the Runway outfits (won’t ship to Canada), or a new set of drinking glasses (so much more expensive on Amazon.ca, you wouldn’t believe it). These pilgrimages became even more frequent when Ben & Jerry’s stopped distributing New York Super Fudge Chunk in Canada. Once you’ve committed to hitting Blaine for a monthly ice cream restock, you might as well order some shoes, board games, or toilet paper from Amazon.com.

Cross-border shoppers like me have helped drive a major boom here, swelling Blaine’s population from a sleepy 3,770 in 2000 to an almost-bustling 5,075 in 2017. That impact is felt not only in the number of parcel shops in town but also in the volume of business they’re doing. An employee at 24/7 Parcel told me that their customer list has grown from about 8,000 to nearly 40,000 in less than five years.

There are so many parcel shops, in fact, that it’s causing a disturbance. “People are annoyed to see more and more parcel places open when they’d rather see a bakery or grocery store,” said a local diner worker. “We used to have another grocery store, but it closed 20 years ago. We used to have a bakery, but it closed.”

An employee at 24/7 Parcel told me that their customer list has grown from about 8,000 to nearly 40,000 in less than five years

Spend an hour at 24/7 Parcel, and you’ll see a magnificent cross-section of Canadians and their purchases. A father and daughter unboxed two massive boxes of premium puppy treats for their beloved huskies. A young man hobbled up the shop’s six steps on crutches to pick up a pair of Rockports and a mysteriously long package. A woman unboxed a bra and underwear while comparing notes with me on the hazards of buying underwear by mail. While this particular mailbox operation is notable for its self-serve lockers, a staffer is also available to help with oversized items, package returns, and — maybe most importantly — fashion advice on the unboxed purchases.

The real impact of all these Canadian shoppers is felt the most at City Hall — or more accurately, City Floor. The City of Blaine now does business out of the top two stories of an office tower that the city purchased from the enterprising businessman who’d dared to dream that the city needed a four-story building. That’s where I met with Jeffrey Lazenby, the city’s revenue officer, who recalled a time when city staff worked out of a run-down edifice with mushrooms growing out of the damp carpets.

All that changed, thanks to the e-commerce boom and state tax policies. Lazenby traced Blaine’s revenue windfall to a sales tax agreement that was put in place in the mid-2000s which allowed states to levy sales taxes based on where a package was delivered, rather than where it was sold. Though the agreement only led to municipalities keeping a sliver of those state sales taxes, that sliver can really add up when you’re the point of delivery for tens of thousands of Canadian residents. In 2017, Blaine collected nearly $1.7 million in sales tax, which is two to five times the amount collected by comparably sized towns not on the Canadian border.

That $1.7 million in sales tax isn’t all earned from Canadians who are buying discount housewares on Amazon: some of it comes from local purchases or online purchases by actual residents of Blaine. But between the sales tax and a penny-per-gallon gas tax that’s largely paid by the many Canadians who cross the border to fill their tanks, Lazenby calculates that taxes paid by Canadians make up 5–10 percent of the city’s revenues. And that’s just the direct revenue. Lazenby estimates that three-quarters of Blaine’s employment is related to the border in some way.

But just as Amazon.com helped drive Blaine’s cross-border boom, Amazon.ca now calls Blaine’s future into question. In the past two years, Amazon’s Canadian arm has driven up growth in its Prime memberships, introduced same-day delivery in select cities (including Vancouver), and vastly extended both the range and number of products available in its Canadian store. That strategy is paying off: according to Canadian financial analysts, the company’s Canadian revenue grew from $2 billion in 2014 to $3.5 billion in 2016.

If you want an indicator of Amazon’s growing commitment to a Canadian presence, look no further than downtown Vancouver. Amazon recently purchased a monolithic building that, until recently, served as Vancouver’s main post office and one of Western Canada’s largest mail-processing facilities. (You’ve probably seen this historic building in one of the many sci-fi TV shows and movies filmed in Vancouver.) The company recently announced that it is redeveloping the building to house 3,000 software engineers and other corporate types.

just as Amazon.com helped drive Blaine’s cross-border boom, Amazon.ca now calls Blaine’s future into question

Even habitual cross-border shoppers like me can now hold out hope that Amazon may eventually close the persistent, puzzling, and much-discussed price difference between US and Canadian prices for many items.

But what’s good news for Canadian shoppers could be bad news for Blaine. Just a few years ago, the city manager named Amazon the number one contributor to the city’s sales tax base. And you only need to eyeball the piles of Amazon boxes in the recycling bins of local mailbox shops to know that it still dominates among Canadian shoppers. Now, Canadians can not only get their electronics, books, and housewares from Amazon.ca, but they can also access a comparable range of clothing, shoes, and other goods. So it’s unlikely that they’ll still submit to the hassle of cross-border package pickup.

Improved Amazon.ca shipping isn’t the only threat to Blaine’s e-commerce economy. If Amazon sets up its own lockers in Blaine — as Amazon.com has in more than 50 US cities and Amazon.ca has in Toronto and Vancouver — it’s hard to imagine that more than one or two of Blaine’s mailbox shops will be able to survive.

Until then, the City of Blaine will continue to reap the benefits of Amazon Canada’s shortcomings and the town’s unique geographical location. The residents of Blaine will have to endure the polite hordes of Canadians who sojourn here regularly, congesting local roads, patronizing the booming parcel economy, and emptying grocery-store shelves of their favorite products. And as long as Rent the Runway refuses to ship to Canada, I’ll be one of them.

The shady data-gathering tactics used by Cambridge Analytica were an open secret to online marketers. I know, because I was one

2018-03-25T13:19:55-04:00

The recently revealed Facebook data “breach” that allowed Cambridge Analytica to get access to millions of users’ worth of Facebook data has been greeted as a shocking scandal. Reporters and readers have been surprised to learn about the ability to gather personal data on the friends of people who install a Facebook app, the conversion of a personality quiz into a source of political data, the idea that you can target marketing messages based on individual psychographic profiles, and the surreptitious collection of data under the guise of academic research, later used for political purposes. But there is one group of people who are mostly unsurprised by these revelations: the market researchers and digital marketers who have known about (and in many cases, used) these tactics for years. I’m one of them.

Back when the Cambridge Analytica data was getting collected by an enterprising academic, I was the vice president of social media for Vision Critical, a customer intelligence software company that powers customer feedback for more than a third of the Fortune 100 companies. Our enterprise clients wanted to know how social media data could complement the insights they were getting from their customer surveys, and it was my job to come up with a way of integrating social media data with survey data.

The company’s data set — by then, nearly 17.5 million strong— was based on just 52,600 actual installs, each of which provided access to an average of 332 friends

Vision Critical’s blue chip customer roster made us an appealing target for the many social media vendors hawking data-gathering solutions. In 2012, the data analytics firm Microstrategy pitched me on their “Wisdom” tool for Facebook, which the company had touted as a data source based on ”12 million anonymous, opted-in Facebook users.” But when I spoke with an analyst at Microstrategy that December, he told me that the company’s data set — by then, nearly 17.5 million strong— was based on just 52,600 actual installs, each of which provided access to an average of 332 friends.

Nor was Microstrategy doing something unusual. The tactic of collecting friend data, which has been featured prominently in the Cambridge Analytica coverage, was a well-known way of turning a handful of app users into a goldmine.

“We were all conscious that friend data was accessible,” says Sam Weston, a communications consultant who has been working in digital marketing and market research for nearly two decades. “I don’t think that anybody had perspective on the potential consequences until it was slotted into this news story, where the consequence may have been the election of Donald Trump.”

Mary Hodder, a longtime privacy consultant who is now the product developer for the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group, was equally unsurprised. “I knew 10 years ago that Facebook’s API allowed an entity to gather friend data,” Hodder told me. “But I wasn’t surprised that the 95 percent of the population that didn’t understand this were shocked. They thought if Facebook was going to sell you out, it would just be you. They didn’t know you would take all your friends with you.”

Pages and apps like this might have seemed innocent to the average Facebook user, but people in the marketing community were hardly deceived

If Facebook’s generous access to friend data was known to many marketers and software developers, so was the tactic of disguising data grabs as fun apps, pages, or quizzes. Another company I spoke with back in 2012 was LoudDoor, a Facebook advertising company that offered enhanced ad targeting based on the data they were gathering from millions of Facebook users. The company ran a network of Facebook pages that were essentially content farms, like the Diving Wrecks and Reefs page that consisted of pretty underwater photos. Interspersed with all the photos were occasional come-ons for fan surveys that would enter you in a contest; taking the survey meant installing a “fan satisfaction” app that gave LoudDoor access to all your data. Pages and apps like this might have seemed innocent to the average Facebook user, but people in the marketing community were hardly deceived.

“It was pretty common knowledge among people who understood the internet that if you were taking a quiz to find out what kind of cheese you are, somebody on the other end is very interested in getting that data,” says Susanne Yada, a Facebook ad strategist. “I wish I could say I was more surprised and more alarmed. I just assumed that if you take a quiz, someone would know who you are because you are signed into Facebook.”

Among the ubiquitous data-gathering apps of that period, the personality quiz that Cambridge Analytica created was nothing special. “It is actually stunning to think, with the clarity that perspective brings, that you could stand up the kind of ridiculous quiz or survey that they did and then walk away with psychographic profiles on 50 million Americans,” Weston muses now. “Even for someone who worked in the field, [the Cambridge Analytica story] was a moment that gave you real pause to reflect on the business that we walked away from, but that was a massive part of the industry for a long time.”

They had close to 12 million users, which gave them access to data on 85 million Americans

And yes, these “fun” apps gathered your friends’ data too: the LoudDoor salesperson I spoke with at the time told me that they had close to 12 million users, which gave them access to data on 85 million Americans. But that friend data grab was far from clear to fans of the page, even if the company’s disclosure notice explained that the purpose of its app was to ensure that “brands can make better decisions about which content they should promote to you.”

As for the idea that the purpose of gathering data is to target ads — well, Cambridge Analytica is scarcely an outlier there, either. Mary Hodder recalls working with a company called Apisphere that used location data for ad targeting back in 2008 and 2009.

“We did this project for the Hard Rock Cafe Casino in Las Vegas,” Hodder told me. “They wanted to put wands in the ceiling to collect the IMEI [identification] numbers of every phone that went by, map everywhere they went in the casino or on the property, and map them in the hallways up to their rooms. And then they could do a reverse lookup on IMEI numbers because there are companies that aggregate IMEI numbers, and as soon as they figured out who the person was, they could send them offers, text them offers, and the people had not opted in. So they were basically just intercepting your phone, and figuring out how to send messages to you in one form or another.”

Hodder remembers objecting to this as at a meeting where the rest of her colleagues saw nothing amiss with the practice: that’s how normal it was to harvest data and use it to target individual ads, long before Cambridge Analytica got in on the action. For those of us who were witness to the “look what we can do!” explosion of data-driven marketing tactics, it takes some reflection to understand why the practices of Cambridge Analytica have surprised so many people.

“When you say ‘We’re creating psychological profiles to sway people,’ marketers have been doing that since marketing existed,” Yada observes. “But I think there’s a difference between actually representing what your services are and how they can help people, versus being really clandestine and trying to sway people with fake news.”

“When you say ‘We’re creating psychological profiles to sway people,’ marketers have been doing that since marketing existed.”

“The fundamental problem is the gap in understanding about what Facebook’s business model actually is,” Weston says. ”You know how Target’s business model works, or how Apple’s business model works, but nobody understands how these folks [digital marketers] actually make money. That’s not just true for Facebook but for every ad-supported business and every data-supported business, which is just about every tech company… [Facebook] did a good job talking to Wall Street about how their business works, but at no point did they actually talk to their users.“

Given the widespread normalization of deceptive data gathering and marketing tactics, I count myself lucky that the company I worked with didn’t buy into the frenzy of the social media data gold rush. Because Vision Critical had its roots in the market research industry, where there are norms and codes of practice around how you handle respondent data, the idea of grabbing up friend data was utterly anathema: the company’s founder dismissed it as a non-starter the very first time it came up, and at every stage in developing our own Facebook app, we disclosed that we were using it to gather data.

But the whole time, it felt like we were swimming against the tide by following old-school standards for transparency and accountability in how we handled data. I hate to admit how many times I pitched my colleagues on some clever way of incentivizing people to connect to Facebook, based on some scheme or app I’d just stumbled across, only to be reminded that it would violate our data or privacy policies. If I’d been working in a digital marketing agency where gamifying data requests was the norm, I can easily see how I might have yielded to the temptation of disguising a data grab with a recreational app, or scooping up friend data just because it was there.

That experience points to how difficult it will be to reform not just Facebook, but the larger industry of data collectors and marketing shops that have evolved to maximize the amount of data collected and the precision of ad targeting. Social networks and other advertising platforms may set up various processes that notionally screen out data aggregators or manipulative advertisers, but as long as these companies run on advertising revenue, they have little incentive to promote transparency among data brokers and advertisers. And those industries, in turn, have little motivation to place ethics ahead of profit.

The outrage now directed at Cambridge Analytica and Facebook suggests there might be an appetite for an online ecosystem based on a different compact between consumers, platforms and advertisers. But we won’t build that ecosystem by pretending that this is a matter of a few bad actors. It’s time for us to face up to what online marketers and researchers have known for more than a decade: the contemporary Internet runs on the exploitation of user data, and that fact won’t change until consumers, regulators and businesses commit to a radically different model.

Alexandra Samuel is the former VP of Social Media for Vision Critical. She is now an independent technology writer and a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, JSTOR Daily, and The Harvard Business Review.

Silicon Valley needs to change how it treats working mothers

2017-11-07T11:35:44-05:00

Over and over, Emily Holtz Patterson heard the same questions when she started looking for work a few months after the birth of her second daughter:

“So, I see this gap on your resume… “

“Are you sure you want to come back? Are you sure you want to go back to work?”

“Tech changes so fast. How are you going to keep up?”

Patterson has a degree in management information systems and 10 years of tech industry experience; it had never taken her more than six weeks to find a job. But for the first time in her career, she was sending out volleys of job applications, and getting only a handful of screening calls in return. When she did interview, she found herself repeatedly answering the same question: what was this mysterious gap on her résumé?

Patterson’s experience reflects a dilemma in the tech world. Faced with growing criticism of Silicon Valley’s gender diversity problem, many tech companies have invested in feel-good programs that encourage girls to pursue STEM learning, like Girls Who Code and Iridescent, or to study computer science in college. But it’s only just starting to work on the other side of equation: providing the training opportunities, flexibility, and mid-career on-ramps that make it possible for women to stay in the tech world after having kids.

A 2013 analysis found that half of female STEM professionals leave the field within 12 years

The data on the career trajectory of women in computing shows why this challenge is so critical for the future of the industry. A 2013 analysis found that half of female STEM professionals leave the field within 12 years, compared with less than 20 percent of women in other professional fields. These women aren’t switching to other fields; rather, STEM professionals are much more likely than other professionals to leave the workforce altogether after having kids.

The reason may be an industry culture that stymies mid-career women. A 2016 report from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) blames the retention issue on “workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career.”

That makes women coming back from maternity leave or child-rearing — often referred to as “returning women” — a key test for the industry. Returning women can be rebuffed by an industry that is often criticized for its institutional and cultural biases against women — or they can be embraced as a way of closing the industry’s gender gap.

“The tech industry is desperate for highly skilled workers,” observes Lisen Stromberg, author of Work, Pause, Thrive: How to Pause for Parenthood Without Killing Your Career. “They need to reframe their hiring policies so that women want to work for them.”

Those hiring policies can be particularly tough for women who are trying to return to technical roles. During an interview process, “a lot of what you’re asked is, ‘tell me about a project you’ve worked on recently’,” says Kathryn Rotondo, an iOS developer who now works for online training company Udacity. Rotondo is the creator and host of Motherboard, a podcast that collects stories from mothers working in the tech field. Rotondo’s own experience returning to development work after the birth of her son a decade ago informs her understanding of the subject.

“The team I was on at the time was an ActionScript development shop,” Rotondo recalls, referring to a programming language that was widely used in the days when Macromedia Flash ruled the interactive web. “The iPhone had come out, and Flash was being killed, so the work was drying up on my team… I came back to work from maternity leave, and a month later, I was let go.”

Suddenly, Rotondo was in the middle of a job hunt — but with a rapidly depreciating skill set, and a baby at home. “I remember my colleagues going home and studying up and making passion projects on iOS,” she says. “I was going home to my baby, and still nursing at night and being exhausted and not having the wherewithal to keep up with changing tech. That made me a less valuable person on my team, and made it harder to find work when I was out of work.”

“I came back to work from maternity leave, and a month later, I was let go.”

Stromberg argues that women tend to overestimate the skill barrier to returning to work. “There’s the perception that if you’re out of the path, it’s too hard to get back in.” But she notes that women who return to the workplace after pausing to have kids often come back with significant soft skills, like knowing how to make efficient use of their time.

“You can teach someone a new computer program, but you can’t teach someone these soft skills very easily,” Stromberg says. “I talked to one CEO who basically said to me, this is my secret weapon: I go out and hire these women and they rock my world because they are more mature and more committed. A lot of executives found these returning women very effective after they got over the immediate hump of ‘I need to learn this month’s version of Slack.’”

Diane Flynn is focused on helping women get over that very hump. After pausing her paid work for 16 years, she returned to work as the CMO for GSVLabs. While she was initially overwhelmed by all the new tech tools she had to learn, it didn’t take her long to get back up to speed. Soon, she started hearing from other women who envied her return to the working world.

“There were so many people in my community who wanted to do what I just did,” she tells me. “What I heard over and over was ‘I have no confidence.’ It hit me that there is this huge pool of talent that is not being deployed.”

“What I heard over and over was ‘I have no confidence.’”

Those conversations inspired Flynn to team up with a small group of women to found Reboot Accel, a “career accelerator” focused on getting women back into the workplace. From an initial eight-week cohort of 50 women, the company has expanded to eight cities across the country, and more than 700 women have now participated in its programs over the past two years. This fall, it’s running a road show with a group of companies, including Facebook, Survey Monkey, and JetBlue, that are actively trying to recruit women who are returning to the workforce.

Flynn is keen to note that tech professionals are not unique in facing barriers to re-entry. “Any role you take now has a technology component that probably didn’t exist a few years ago,” Flynn says. “If you’re in HR, you need to know how to use a CRM. If you’re in law, you have to know how to use Google Docs. We use Slack one week, and the next we’re using Telegram. There are so many things you have to know and just be comfortable with.”

While the skills required to return to the tech workforce depend on the particular role, the need for flexibility is a constant. Flexibility is what drove Maura, who wished to remain anonymous for this article, to take on a part-time contract with a well-funded startup rather than a full-time job when she returned to tech after having her second child. Soon, she was working 30 hours a week, and talking with the company about turning her contract work into an actual job.

That’s when things fell apart. “I was told to choose between a permanent full-time position, which was described as 50 to 60 hours a week, or to continue on a part-time contract — which would mean no benefits and no equity and not great pay. And I was told that the reason I was being asked to work these longer hours was because they needed to ramp up the velocity by hiring someone who could work longer hours.”

“There is research that shows that if you work more than 40 hours, you get less productive,” Maura observes. “It is extremely frustrating to me as a parent, and as someone whose spouse works two jobs, to be told that to be effective I have to work more than 50 hours a week. If you can’t figure out what to do with someone who has lots of seniority and skills, just because they don’t have as many hours available as someone with fewer family responsibilities, then maybe you need stronger management skills.”

“This isn’t a women’s issue. This is a business issue.”

Maura’s experience reflects one of the key recommendations in NCWIT’s 2016 report on increasing women’s participation in computing: supporting flexible schedules by making flexibility the norm for all employees.

Stromberg vehemently agrees. “This isn’t a women’s issue. This is a business issue,” she tells me. “We have spent the last 20 years making this a women’s issue. In that time, women’s workforce participation has stagnated, while [other countries in] our peer group [have] made huge progress. It’s affecting our economy… we have a talent crisis coming up if we can’t keep women and men engaged.”

After interviewing women throughout the tech industry for her podcast, Rotondo thinks that companies are now doing a better job of providing the kind of flexibility that makes it easier to return to the tech workforce. “I’ve seen a lot of companies expand their leave,” she says. “I’ve seen companies work on improving their processes for things like training managers to talk about leave, so that the first conversation they have with an employee who announces their pregnancy is not the first time they’ve ever talked about it. I’ve seen companies work on providing a more consistent and better experience for women returning from leave.”

What’s still missing, Rotondo observes, are “those on-ramps to help women — or maybe dads who left — get back into technical roles.” One promising approach to building these on-ramps lies in “returnships”: apprenticeship programs aimed at getting mid-career professionals back into the workplace. While the specifics of these programs vary from company to company (here’s a partial list), typical returnships are designed to ease the return to work for people (often women) who’ve been out of the workforce for an extended period of time. Returnships offer a combination of paid work experience, mentoring, and skills training, and may last anywhere from eight weeks to a full year. At the end of a returnship, a returner may or may not be hired as a regular employee, but at the very least, they have more recent experience on their résumé — and some new skills and contacts.

While returnships have occasionally been criticized for exploiting the insecurity of mid-career returners, Flynn thinks they can play a useful role in bringing women back to work. “Diversity and inclusion people love the idea of hiring returners,” Flynn says, “but then you get to the hiring managers, and they get scared that these people are dinosaurs. So returnships are low-cost, and low-risk. They give both people a chance to try it out.”

That kind of mid-career entryway may be particularly valuable for women who are seeking their first technical positions after having children, like Eraina Ferguson. Ferguson decided to move into the tech field when she was expecting her third child.

“You may need to dedicate three months or six months to skilling back up.”

“I built my first app through this program called Apps Without Code when I was literally nine months pregnant,” says Ferguson. “I auditioned for Apple’s Planet of the Apps and got to the second round; I was able to submit the basic framework for a jobseekers app, and I did it without code. And I was like, ‘Wow, I can do this without code. But is that really what I want to do?’” Ferguson subsequently enrolled in an online course that’s now training her to be a front-end developer, with the idea that she can build her startup — or get a full-time job.

Ferguson’s investment in her own tech skills maps onto the advice Rotondo has for mothers who are trying to return to technical positions. “You may need to dedicate three months or six months to skilling back up,” she says. “I would encourage other moms to have patience with that process.”

Patience paid off for Patterson. After running a gauntlet of hiring managers who scratched their heads at the 18-month gap in her résumé, she connected with ItemMaster, a tech startup that hired her for their product management team.

“My current boss was very comfortable with the fact that this happens, and it’s not a big deal,” Patterson says. “Because it’s a smaller company, there’s a lot less ingrained expectations. Because we are a smaller team, it’s a lot more flexible.”

Her experience reflects the words of wisdom Stromberg likes to pass on to mothers who are looking to return to the work world — whether in the tech sector or beyond.

“Don’t worry about the path,” Stromberg says. “Make sure you’re choosing the right company.”