Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Tajani: "A European project that has allowed the Administration to focus its attention on women and on a better work-life balance"

Milan, March 24 2021 – Milan is increasingly attentive to maternity support and better work-life balance. The final event of the MASP - Master Parenting in Work and Life project will be held on Thursday 25 March, from 10am to 13pm, broadcast live on the www.maspfinalconference.com platform and on the Facebook page @MASPMasterParentingInWorkandLife. An opportunity to explore two increasingly urgent issues: the reconciliation of personal and working life and the promotion of female participation in the labor market, starting from the experience gained in two years of field work from the European project MASP.

"The MASP project is the result of an experiment carried out within the Municipality of Milan - explains the councilor for Labor Policies and Human Resources of the Municipality of Milan, Cristina Tajani -. For women (and men) on parental leave, a way was offered to reflect on the new skills that parenthood leaves in everyone, finding a way to apply them when returning to the office and making them a strong point. Recognizing these soft skills - continues the councilor - is an enrichment for those who work and for companies and this is why the European Union wanted to bet on the topic. A project that has allowed us to see being parents as an added value for people and for society and not as an obstacle. organizational innovation in the world of work, a driver of attractiveness, has been our goal for some time. This has been the case for agile working, and this is how we continue to do in terms of corporate welfare and conciliation policies. Thanks to the platform and the app accessible to everyone IT support - concludes Tajani - we allow many young people, but above all many women, today the most affected by the economic fallout of the pandemic, to discover the training opportunities offered by Afol in line with their skills and aspirations".

It will be the councilor Tajani who will open the day of international comparison who will propose a program full of interventions by experts who will provide the participants with a cross-section not only nationally, but also European, of the topics covered thanks to the specific connotation of the project.

MASP is a project financed by the European Union with an international collaboration which sees the Municipality of Milan as the leader of a series of partners: Employment Agency of the Autonomous Province of Trento, AFOL Metropolitana, BIN ITALIA Association, API (Association of Small and Medium Enterprises), CGM Cooperative Group, EUROSMAC, Lifeed (Maam Life Based Learning), REVES Network and AICCON. 

The main objective of MASP, in addition to providing unemployed women with caring duties, useful skills in job search and encouraging a more equitable division of family responsibilities between men and women, was to support companies in adopt new tools useful for recognizing the importance of these skills in the workplace, for organizational development and the increase in company competitiveness. All accompanied by constant research and analysis of best practices activated at national and European level in order to create a shared model capable of benefiting from a valuable multi-level and multi-stakeholder partnership. 

The project allowed the creation of www.masp4skills.it a platform and an app aimed particularly at women aged 28-49 who are unemployed and engaged in the path of parenthood so that the transversal skills acquired during motherhood, such as empathy, listening and the ability to manage time, can be transformed into useful skills for the world of work and promote employment. Specifically, the platform and the app are developed on three levels: identification and enhancement of the soft skills on which to focus - tools and advice for looking for work - the protection of equal opportunities: anti-discrimination regulatory references, a real handbook to best reconcile private life and work. 

An "online" publication was also created which constitutes a real "parenting kit" aimed at facilitating access to information on social protection rights for new fathers and mothers in the workplace. There is also a wealth of information on the paths and support offered by the Administrations and companies to facilitate entry and permanence in the job market.

Thursday 25 March will represent the ideal opportunity to investigate the results of a virtuous project carried out from 2019 to today. To view the program and register for the event, visit the website: www.maspfinalconference.com