Career Allies keeps new moms in the workforce through its pregnancy planning platform

FORT COLLINS – A woman-owned startup is looking to stem the tide of women who leave the workforce after having a child.

Thirty percent of women who have children don’t return to their positions after maternity leave, said Jennifer Henderson, founder of Fort Collins-based Career Allies Inc. Often, it’s not because they don’t want to work, but because at some point their transition to maternity leave and back was mishandled in a way that they decided they would ultimately rather not go back to that place of work.

“The leave can be mishandled in ways like their supervisor saying something inappropriate or if the woman feels like her leave was handled transactionally,” Henderson explained to BizWest. “It ends up that the mom might come back looking for elsewhere to go. So there are 30 percent who leave out of the gate, but upward of 80 percent say they would have remained employed had they not had a bad experience, if there was a flexible arrangement or other fringe benefits like childcare subsidies or even just a nursing room. Something as easy as that means the world to moms.”

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She added that there is also a spectrum of discrimination that women experience that is not usually ill-intended but is an epidemic.

“Often a woman will disclose that she’s pregnant and find herself removed from the possibility of promotions with the intention of making her life easier,” she said. “She won’t be offered things or will have things removed from her plate without being asked if that’s what she wants. There’s an assumption when you’re growing a human that you don’t want to be engaged in stretch assignments.”

The results can be hugely detrimental: If a person opts out of the workforce for two years, it often means a 30 to 40 percent earnings reduction compared to someone who didn’t opt out, she said. And even if a woman doesn’t opt out, she is likely to lose 10 percent even if she returns to work immediately.

Career Allies has created a software-as-a-service platform that looks to change the negative experience of being a pregnant woman or new mother in the workforce. The program connects supervisors or HR managers with company employees to have all communication regarding the pregnancy and maternity transition in one place and to improve the line of discussion.

The company has created a dashboard that helps both supervisors and employees lay out a trimester-by-trimester pregnancy plan and timeline. There are trainings in the form of videos and readings that can teach managers about unconscious bias and employees about the benefits that are available to them in the company. There’s a benefits scenario employees can walk through when they are considering getting pregnant so they are well aware of what is available to them specifically before they get pregnant.

The dashboard has a variety of documents: a parental policy generator for companies, legal compliance documents and agreements between the employer and employees. Crucially, there is a knowledge transfer program so all the responsibilities of pregnant employees can be smoothly transferred to other employees or their temporary replacements so workflow is not disrupted. On the managerial side, supervisors can see a clear picture of how many pregnant employees they have, how far along they are, when they will be leaving and what pertinent tasks and documents they have completed or need to complete.

The company’s solutions were born out of Henderson’s personal experiences. She has two children, and for each pregnancy, she was at a different corporate job. Both times she was pregnant, she found herself up for promotion immediately prior to being pregnant and then found that promotion opportunity was taken away while pregnant. She chose not to litigate and instead decided to leave her job the second time it happened and instead create a solution. After throwing herself into research of how other companies and countries handle maternity leave, that solution became Career Allies, which went to market two months ago.

The platform works for small and large companies. Career Allies has completed its pilots and is now gaining early adopters. The company is also seeking seed funding, with the intention to build out all of its features — including new ones like predictive analytics.

Henderson said the hope is that the Career Allies SaaS makes the transition to maternity leave a smooth and enjoyable one. And that should an employee decide to take an extended leave, she feels she has a place to come back to when she’s ready.

“Coming back to work can be so scary,” she said. “We want to help give women a warm place to land and help them feel like they didn’t burn a bridge when they left.”

The company is also working to build a solution for enterprise companies that have multiple departments and likely multiple pregnant women and new mothers at any given time. In the next few years, the company has plans of scaling globally. There are also plans of adopting the platform for other extended leave needs, such as sabbatical or disability leave.

Henderson said that companies that adopt solutions like this aren’t just making their workflow and current employees’ lives easier, they are setting themselves up to be an attractive company for millennials and Gen Z employees who will want to have kids in the future.

“Employees are sending the message that they won’t stay with organizations that not only don’t support a work-life balance but don’t also have direct programs to support a work-life balance,” she said. “People will never stop having kids; it’s an evergreen problem…. We’ve driven to make this a SaaS-enabled service that is applicable from the front line employees to the C-Suite. As the war for talent gets more ridiculous, these services can help in recruiting and retaining talent.”