of the labor force. While some of those women were disabled or retired, the remaining 3,600,000 women may be candidates to return to work. (5) The Center for Talent Innovation’s research shows that while 93 percent of women who left the workforce want to resume their careers, only 74 percent manage to get any kind of job at all and just 40 percent successfully return to work full-time. (6) Mid-career internship and other returnship programs are an effective way to address the difficulties of former STEM employees seeking to return to work, as the programs provide a probationary period and also an opportunity to obtain mentorship, professional development, and support as the participants transition back to work. Even more important, returnship programs allow an employer to base a hiring decision on an actual work sample instead of a series of interviews. At the same time, the programs give participants an opportunity to return to work together, in a cohort of similarly situated returners. (7) Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman, Ingersoll Rand, and The Procter & Gamble Company have taken the initiative to try to close the gender gap among STEM professionals by providing mid-career internships for returning technical professionals. However, a 2008 study by Anthony Breitzman and Diana Hicks for the Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration, entitled An Analysis of Small Business Patents by Industry and Firm Size , found that Small firms are much more likely to develop emerging technologies than are large firms. This is perhaps intuitively reasonable given theories on small firms effecting technological change, but the quantitative data here support this assertion. Specifically, although small firms account for only 8 percent of patents granted, they account for 24 percent of the patents in the top 100 emerging clusters. . (b) Purposes The purposes of this section are to— (1) prioritize expanding opportunities, through high-quality internships or other returnships in STEM