Ten years ago, Allison Robinson was on maternity leave from her job at Procter & Gamble when she came across a statistic that stopped her cold: an estimated 43% of highly skilled women leave the workforce after becoming mothers. Robinson had spent years working closely with moms through P&G's Pampers brand, and she knew firsthand how much talent and ambition was being lost to a system that simply wasn't built for parents.
So in 2016, she founded The Mom Project and turned that one insight into a company that has since become one of the largest platforms connecting professional moms with employers who actually want them.
From an idea to a movement
The premise was simple but overdue: mothers returning to work, or looking for something more flexible than the standard 9-to-5, needed a real pipeline to employers who valued their experience rather than penalizing their career gaps. Robinson built The Mom Project as a digital talent marketplace, and it grew fast. Today it connects over a million professional moms with thousands of companies through hiring, upskilling, and retention programs, and it's raised more than $116 million in funding along the way, the largest single investment in female workforce development to date.
What makes the platform stand out isn't just the job matching. It's the ecosystem built around it:
- RALLY, a mentorship initiative helping moms navigate re-entry into the workforce
- RISE, a nonprofit scholarship program launched in 2020 in direct response to the disproportionate pandemic layoffs faced by women of color — offering upskilling in fields like data analytics, UX, IT support, and project management
- SelfMade, a platform expanding opportunities for freelancers and entrepreneurs
RISE alone has helped thousands of women and moms of color move into higher-paying, in-demand careers, generating millions in additional annual salary for its graduates.
Why it still matters
Robinson has been candid that "having it all" isn't really possible, and that the guilt many working mothers feel when something slips through the cracks is one of the most universal, least talked-about parts of the job. Rather than sell an impossible ideal, The Mom Project set out to build something more useful: real flexibility, real community, and real opportunity, on terms that fit an actual working mother's life.
The company has continued to evolve. Robinson has since stepped into the role of Chairwoman, with Penny Queller now leading as CEO, and The Mom Project continues to grow, expanding its team and partnerships even this year.
It's a good reminder of what's possible when a founder builds a solution around a problem she's lived, rather than one she's only heard about.
Sources: KonMari - Allison Robinson interview; HR Dive - How The Mom Project connects skilled moms with flexible employers; The Mom Project Press Page