Promama is the startup that, through its proprietary digital platform with a large community of over 2 thousand users, connects career mothers and parents of today and tomorrow with family-friendly companies. Balancing life and work is difficult, but it becomes really difficult when you are a mother in Italy. As evidenced by data from the Labour Inspectorate, in 2022 there were 44,699 working mothers who left their jobs, up 18.7% compared to 2021. In ten years, the resignation of working mothers has more than doubled, from 18,454 in 2012 to the current 44,000. In fact, more than 6 out of 10 new mothers highlight among the reasons the difficulty in keeping together employment and care work, compared to 7.1% of fathers. The latest ISTAT data confirm what has been said so far: With an unemployment rate of 8.1% and 42.6% of mothers between 25 and 54 years old not employed, Italy shows that it still has a long way to go to achieve gender equality. Promama was born from the direct and personal experience lived by the founder, Claudine Rollandin, former product manager of a scaleup and with years of experience in consulting and in the startup world, as a new mother, she began to feel the first difficulties at work: “I began to understand on my skin, how much my profession and work activity were no longer in line with my new priorities and my values – explains Rollandin in a note -. I started looking for something else, but I quickly realized how difficult it was at this time in life. Then one day I saw the employment data of mothers with young children, in Italy just over one in two works, and I began to think about what I could do to help parents like me not have to choose between career and family”.
Family-friendly index
The Promama team has developed the family-friendly index, a synthetic proprietary metric, specifically a qualitative-quantitative assessment of how attentive a company is to the issue of parenthood, delving into the levers activated in the areas of flexibility, parental leave, corporate culture and support. “Through two dedicated surveys, designed for employees or companies, we calculate an index (from 0-100%) that allows us to evaluate the attention that the company gives to its people and to parenthood,” adds Rollandin. For parents, the startup aims to make it easier to find jobs in companies that are in line with their goals, ambitions, aspirations and needs, by providing a showcase of job offers from family-friendly companies, and by providing support, courses and dedicated paths in this specific career phase. On the other hand, with a view to talent attraction, Promama provides companies with a dedicated space on the website promoting initiatives designed for parents, but also with a view to talent retention, providing tools, benchmarks and dedicated resources that support the network towards continuous improvement and updating to make society even more inclusive. “The benefits of being a family-friendly company are many,” explains Rollandin, “companies that are attentive to an inclusive work-life balance have a 100% post-maternity return rate and a significantly lower turnover rate.” Three months after the launch of the project, there are over 2 thousand working parents and mothers active on Promama and the startup collaborates with customers of different sectors and sizes, such as Italgas, Doctolib, Acinque, Twow, Net Insurance and Red Public. Among the startup’s future goals is the launch of a path to accompany the return to work, focused on people who are currently unemployed and the desire to be able to implement a concrete change in the corporate world. “We want to enhance companies that are really and concretely attentive to encouraging the reconciliation of work and family in favor of employees – concludes the founder – so as to be able to contribute to certifying that living parenthood at work is a strength to be valued and not an obstacle to the career”.
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