THE investment bank UBS looks after its female employees. It likes to think that it leads the way in the recruitment and retention of women by offering flexible working, mentoring programmes, day-care provision and generous maternity pay. Now the bank has introduced couple counselling. Lest it sound as if UBS has lost its sense of boundaries, the couple in this counselling consists of the female employee and her manager.

As part of this counselling, managers who have been trained by UBS to handle flexible working arrangements will keep women engaged and happy during and after pregnancy and help them to achieve a life-work balance.

Next month UBS is bringing its latest initiative, the Career Comeback programme, to London with the aim of tapping into what Mona Lau, UBS’s group head of diversity, sees as a pool of squandered talent – the thousands of women who leave work to have children and then struggle to come back.

Three years after a now-defunct subsidiary was ordered to pay out$37m in a sex-discrimination case, UBS is keen to display its diversity credentials. Many of the big banks have had to make similarly embarrassing payments in recent years. But the war for talent is particularly fierce in banking and Lau is determined that UBS’s most talented women won’t simply drift away when they start a family.

In truth, drift is a misleading word for what happens to many women when they become pregnant. According to the Equal Opportunities Commission, 30,000 women a year lose their jobs after becoming pregnant or going on maternity leave. Some companies actually push them out.

One study found that eight out of ten HR professionals believed bosses automatically thought twice about employing women of childbearing age and another study revealed that one in five company directors had personally avoided hiring women of childbearing age.

Career Comeback, then, is a rare effort by business. The course is aimed in large part at former financial high-flyers who are keen, after a career break, to soar again.

“It has always seemed to me that when women leave the workforce a lot of them find it very difficult to come back,” said Lau, who has stepped out twice to have children. “Once out, you often remain out. That really bothers me. It’s just bias of another form.”

UBS has already run its scheme in America (at Wharton Business School), Hong Kong and Sydney. About 60 women with a track record of success and a real interest in getting back into the swim will be selected for the London course being run in conjunction with London School of Economics Executive Education. It offers women the chance to catch up on finance, marketing and technology.

Professors will bring them up to date with the regulatory environment and they will also be offered one-to-one coaching and networking opportunities with each other and at UBS.

UBS has hired some of the women who attended previous courses – and hopes to do so in London too – but Lau said the programme was not a cunningly disguised recruitment scheme. Being able to hire some good women is just a bonus, she said.

“We see the programme more as corporate social responsibility. That’s our first reason for running it,” said Lau. “But the second – let’s not get completely altruistic – is brand.” The brand is boosted when the company is seen “doing the right thing”.

But banking isn’t the only sector making some effort to keep women on board during pregnancy and to lure them back after career breaks. British companies that rely on scientists – and particularly engineers – are struggling to find good staff because our universities are not producing enough science graduates. There is too little fresh blood coming in.

In the energy industry, enlightened employers are also trying to retain women. The flexibility of RPS, a consultancy, helped geoscientist Julie Gale, 47, back into her career after a 10-year break to raise two children.

Gale decided to be a full-time mother until her eldest child reached secondary school. But she admits that going back to work has been hard, not least because she had to reenter the sector at a lower technical level. Her skills were rusty and her knowledge out of date, and she was acutely aware of how far she had fallen behind her peers. “Some were running small oil companies,” she said.

Gale’s reentry has been slow, but steady. In 2000 she started part time in a technical role with RPS and has gradually worked up to full time and more senior roles. She is now a geohazards interpreter.

“I don’t know any other women who have done what I did,” she said. “Most women who have had a career break can’t face coming back further down the ladder. Often they decide to go into something completely different.

“RPS has always been a very flexible company and it was willing to listen to my suggestions about how I might develop. In addition, I have been lucky to be working in an area where there is a skills shortage and to have come back at a time when the oil industry is booming.”

What may also be helping women seeking flexible working arrangements is the growing appeal of flexibility to men. In sectors such as banking and energy where there are skills shortages, employees are increasingly able to dictate their own terms, and the smart companies are learning to be flexible. Both UBS and RPS, for example, sell themselves as a flexible employer to men as well as women.

But what about sectors where these forces are not conspiring to make female employees worth nurturing and where salaries don’t meet childcare costs? There, the lot of women trying to combine family and work remains pretty dire.

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