TIM Women Plus: an app to close the gender gap at work

Women Plus is live. It’s the app TIM created to help women find their way in the job market, with openings, skills matching, training and mentoring in one place. We built it together with AGIC.

TIM launched Women Plus during 4 Weeks 4 Inclusion, the inclusion marathon the Group created, presenting it as the first app in Italy designed to help women look for work. It was developed in collaboration with Women at Business and is free on iOS and Android.

For us it’s one of those projects where digital does what it does best: removing complexity instead of adding it, and becoming a useful tool for a lot of people.

Why an app against the gender gap

At the launch, TIM cited some ISTAT figures that describe the problem well.

Behind these numbers sit several different problems: access to work, career guidance, confidence in one’s own skills, few role models, the difficulty of finding the right opportunities and of getting support at decisive moments.

That’s why Women Plus doesn’t just publish job ads. It brings different tools together in a single app.

From Mulheres Positivas to Women Plus

Women Plus draws on Mulheres Positivas, the project TIM supports in Brazil with entrepreneur Fabi Saad, and shares its core idea: using technology to make women more economically independent, starting from real needs.

Bringing it to Italy wasn’t a translation job. A job app has to follow the way people look for opportunities, fill in a profile, weigh up an offer, apply and train. It has to be simple to use while handling profiles, matching, content, authentication and notifications securely and at scale. Making something simple that isn’t: that’s where a digital project proves itself.

What users find in the app

• Job opportunities: open positions gathered in one place.
• Matching: a comparison between the skills in a profile and the available roles.
• Training: content to build the skills the market is asking for.
• Mentoring: guidance programs to find direction and grow.
• Talks: stories and professional role models to learn from.

The value lies in how these parts connect. A job ad on its own doesn’t help much if you can’t tell how well it fits your profile, which skills to strengthen and which paths to explore. Matching narrows the gap between what someone can do and the opportunities available; training and mentoring help close it. The goal isn’t only to find a job, but to build a stronger career path.

How Women Plus is built

1. ExperienceReact NativeiOS and Android app from a single codebase
2. AccessGoogle FirebaseSingle sign-on authentication
3. ServicesAzure FunctionsServerless microservices that scale with load
4. Data and contentDirectusHeadless backend for the app’s data and content

With AGIC we designed an architecture built for high volumes and for growth over time, up to scenarios with millions of potential users.

• iOS and Android app in React Native. One codebase for both operating systems: shorter development time and simpler maintenance than two separate native apps.
• Directus as the backend. Data and content live in a flexible backend that suits different editorial and functional logic and is easy to evolve. We explain why we use it in this article on Directus.
• Serverless microservices on Azure Functions. Services scale with load, so traffic peaks don’t require servers sized in advance.
• Google Firebase for access. Single sign-on makes getting into the app simple and secure.

Backing from the European Commission

The initiative was supported by the European Commission Representation in Italy. At the launch, EU Commissioner for Equality Helena Dalli pointed to Women Plus as a concrete example of how a company can help remove the barriers to women’s economic empowerment, in line with European strategies on gender equality, women’s leadership and STEM.

What it taught us

When an app has a social purpose, technical quality is part of its credibility. A slow, confusing or unstable app undermines trust in the initiative, not just in the product. So the requirements were clear from the start: easy access, clear navigation, secure data handling, scalability and room for new features.

There’s a less technical side too. A job app isn’t a catalog: it’s a place where people look for possibilities. That changes how you write messages, design journeys and decide what to show.

Women Plus brings together much of what we do in our software engineering and digital experience work: cross-platform apps, headless backends, serverless services, secure authentication and an experience designed for the people who use it. Behind the app there are data, APIs and cloud services. In front of it there are people looking for work, and everything else has to work for them.