Brainpower. Sylvia Ann Hewlett
discussion about women in the U.S. has grown into a global conversation about how to accelerate the progress of all the underleveraged streams of talent in the global workforce: women, yes, but also people of color, LGBTs, and local talent in emerging markets—employees who have largely been left out of talent conversations and not sufficiently included in progression models.
Today, our work impacts six million employees in 192 countries. Our influence has been felt from Bangalore to Beijing, from Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro, from Frankfurt to London, and many points in between. Our findings, insights, and agendas for action have been featured in the mainstream press as well as blue-chip business publications around the world—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times of London, The Guardian, Veja, The Times of India, South China Morning Post, The Economist, BusinessWeek and Forbes. We’ve appeared on Today, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, and National Public Radio. Our online presence ranges from a featured blog with Harvard Business Online to regular posts on The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post. And our research resonates not just among talent managers and human resources specialists but with a wider audience. Articles have appeared in glossy magazines such as Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, MORE, and Grazia and in online media outlets such as Quartz and Slate.
Our Commitment to Data-Driven, Actionable Research
We have always valued rigorous research and put a premium on constructive action. We learned our lesson early on. Just four days before that pivotal meeting at the Century Club ten years ago, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story called “The Opt-Out Revolution.” To the dismay of many thousands of working women, this widely read article made the case that the workplace was not rejecting qualified women; rather, qualified women were rejecting the workplace—and leaving in droves. Despite the fact that this piece was based on interviews with just eight female Princeton graduates it garnered traction and did damage to prospects for female progress. In particular, it provided ready justification for employers reluctant to develop and promote women to positions of leadership. At the Century that day, my lunch companions and I were in fervent agreement on the need to introduce robust and rigorous research into the national conversation.
We therefore kicked off our work at the Center with a large-scale, data-rich study of the career paths of well-qualified women employed in a range of sectors across the economy. Our findings were derived not from a handful of anecdotes but from a nationally representative sample. We were able to demonstrate conclusively that women weren’t throwing in the towel. Those that off-ramped took short career breaks (less than three years) and the vast majority were eager to get back on track. They both needed and wanted a second shot at paid employment. Our commitment to constructive action meant we were careful to showcase solutions to the on-ramping challenge and worked with Task Force companies to develop programs that helped women get back to work.
Our research since has yielded 11 articles for the Harvard Business Review, four groundbreaking books for the Harvard Business Review Press, twenty-three in-depth research reports (four of which are featured in this book) and over 250 new best practices. We could not be more pleased that this body of work has both advanced the dialogue around talent management and led to policies and programs that have improved the prospects and accelerated the progress of women and other previously excluded employees.
Four Critical Selections
Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Revisited updates our 2005 research on women’s nonlinear career paths. This 2010 study again finds that approximately a third of highly qualified women take an off-ramp—voluntarily leaving their jobs for a period of time. A further third take a scenic route—working flextime or part-time for a number of years. In all, nearly three-quarters of accomplished women have interrupted, or nonlinear careers and fail to follow the smooth linear arc that is typical of successful male careers. For this they pay a heavy price in lost earnings and foregone promotion. Both the 2005 and 2010 studies find that almost three-fourths of those who take an off-ramp want to get back on track—but unfortunately, only 40% of these women succeed in finding full-time, mainstream positions. These studies carry profound implications for today’s female workforce: off-ramps and on-ramps are with us in good times (2005) and bad (2010), and employers who fail to rise to the challenge and provide better on-ramps for them will waste the brain power of a significant proportion of the highly credentialed female talent pool.
Vaulting the Color Bar documents the lingering bias that keeps too many African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians stalled several layers below the C-suite, despite their abundance of ambition and talent. In addition to quantifying the cost of underutilizing this tranche of talent, the study reveals how a lack of advocacy—of sponsorship—keeps the best and brightest professionals of color from taking their rightful places in top management. And yet amid this story of missed opportunity, there is good news: organizations that embrace sponsorship can significantly boost engagement, retention, and promotion rates among people of color.
The X-Factor explores the unique gifts and special plight of Generation X-ers whose career progress has both been blocked by Boomers and threatened by leapfrogging Gen Y-ers. Our rich data show the great strengths of X-ers: they are well qualified, enormously driven, and have serious entrepreneurial capabilities. However, in addition to facing blocked career paths, they feel burdened by the demands of extreme jobs and an increasingly extreme parenting model. Under constant stress and tired of waiting in the wings, nearly half are considering quitting their corporate jobs. More than a third of them already have one foot out the door, saying they will leave their employer sometime over the next three years—just when they will be needed most.
The Power of “Out” quantifies the cost to companies when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) employees hide their sexual orientation because they do not consider it “safe” to come out at work. Our research demonstrates that “being in the closet” is in nobody’s interest. It is bad for LGBT employees (increasing isolation and alienation) and it’s bad for employers (lowering rates of productivity and increasing flight risk). In short, being “out” is good for human flourishing but also good for the bottom line. This is a tremendously important set of findings given that nearly half of LGBT employees in the large-scale survey that underlies this study do not choose be “out” at work—it’s just too risky. The costs to employers are enormous—and documented in this study. All too many companies fail to welcome LGBT talent—and end up losing some of their most able and ambitious employees.
Going Global
Since the beginning I’ve been committed to a global talent conversation rather than one that is U.S.-centric. However, over the last few years, with the addition to the Task Force of multinational companies headquartered in Europe and Asia (BP and Genpact are good examples), we’ve been able to extend our reach to a number of both developed and developing countries around the world. For example, we’ve explored Off-Ramps and On-Ramps in Japan and Germany, and examined how to win the war for talent in Brazil, Russia China, and India. Going forward we have plans to expand our global footprint. We’re taking a fresh look at women’s ambition in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, India, China, and Brazil, and we’re developing a much-needed blueprint for Global Executives that draws upon our recent work on Executive Presence as well as Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth. We’re mapping the formidable opportunities that women’s new spending power (we call it “The Power of the Purse”) has unleashed in financial services and the healthcare industry across the world, and we’re taking our LGBT work, “The Power of Out,” to four continents. With this enlargement of scope and span, one thing will remain constant: We’ll continue to provide robust, rigorous research that helps companies and organizations harness the most powerful competitive differentiator they have at their disposal—the brain power of their people.
A Brand New Case for Action
When we published “Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth” (IDM) in September of 2013 I knew that we had produced a seminal study, one which was a fitting culmination of our first ten year journey. At the heart of this work is our discovery of a quantifiable “diversity dividend.” Trained as an economist, I have always believed that leaders will embrace diversity only if there is an airtight business case to support it. Our IDM research deepens a previously existing business case and makes it thoroughly convincing.