Brainpower. Sylvia Ann Hewlett
arrangements for fear of the scorn associated with nontraditional work schedules.
Indeed, today some high-powered men are taking advantage of these flexible work arrangements—and maintaining their high-profile, highly demanding jobs. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, whom Slaughter profiles in her polemic, manages to do much of his top-secret work from home while sharing parenting responsibilities with his wife thanks to technology installed in his home. Certainly nobody is labeling Secretary Steinberg a “loser” for taking advantage of arrangements that afford him greater work-life balance—a remarkable evolution in career options since my days as a correspondent.
Women will always contend with difficult choices as working mothers. Yet, as these pages signal, change is afoot. The corporate structure, once unforgivingly rigid, is accommodating the needs of highly capable women (and men). Change is admittedly slower than most of us wish, but seismic shifts in global demographics and in the way work gets done herald a day when women truly do have it all.
From where I sit, that day may well be tomorrow.
Joanna Coles
Editor-in-Chief, Cosmopolitan
Abstract
Five years ago our groundbreaking study “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success,” (Harvard Business Review, March 2005) found that 37% of highly qualified women take an off-ramp—voluntarily leaving their jobs for a period of time. In addition, fully 66% take a scenic route—working flextime or part-time for a number of years. All in all, nearly three-quarters of the accomplished women in this 2004 survey failed to conjure up the linear lock-step progression of a successful male career. For this they paid a huge price in terms of both earning power and long run promotional prospects.
In the fall of 2009 we conducted a new survey—using the same questionnaire and sampling a similar pool of women—indeed we were able to capture some of the same respondents. We discovered that the ground had shifted in some interesting ways. First, between 2004 and 2009 the number of highly qualified women who off-ramp dropped from 37% to 31%. Some drivers of this decline include: the economic downturn (unemployment rates of 10% make women reluctant to leave a job) and the enhanced importance of female earnings in family budgets—many women simply cannot afford to take time out. In our survey we found that between 2004 and 2009 there was a 28% increase in the number of professional women with nonworking husbands (unemployed or retired).
Secondly, women now off-ramp for a slightly longer period of time—2.7 years on average in 2009, compared to 2.2 years in 2004. This again is linked to the recession. Getting back into the workplace was more challenging in 2009 than in 2004. For example, 20% of women who are currently trying to on-ramp said they are having difficulty doing so because of the downturn.
These small changes between 2004 and 2009 should not obscure the big picture—which remains remarkably constant. Indeed, the alignment between the data sets is uncanny. Take the on-ramping figures: In 2004 and 2009, nearly the same number (74% in 2004, 73% in 2009) of highly qualified women who want to get back to work succeed in finding a job, and only 40% of these were able to find full-time, mainstream jobs.
The 2009 data echoes the 2004 data on another important front: ambition. Highly qualified women continue to be less ambitious than their male peers (35% versus 48% in 2004, 36% versus 51% in 2009). In addition, in both data sets female ambition falls off over time. In 2004, 42% of young women (ages 28-34) saw themselves as very ambitious. By ages 45-55 this figure had fallen to 29%. In 2009 the comparable figures were 45% and 31%. This drop-off is related to off-ramps and scenic routes. As women experience difficulty getting back on the career track, confidence and ambition stall, and many women end up downsizing their dreams.
Finally, the 2004 and 2009 data align on the motivation and engagement fronts. When asked what they want out of work, highly qualified women (in contrast to highly qualified men) emphasize nonmonetary rewards. For women, five drivers or types of motivation (high-quality colleagues, flexible work arrangements, collaborative teams, “give back” to society, recognition) trump the sheer size of the paycheck. For men, on the other hand, compensation is a top pick—coming in second after high-quality colleagues. Women, it turns out, have a high bar. Partly because many of them deal with significant opportunity costs (going to work may well involve leaving a one-year-old in daycare), they need a job to deliver the goods on a variety of fronts.
Five years after the original publication, this research continues to have profound implications: off-ramps and on-ramps are here to stay and employers should sit up and pay attention—or suffer the consequences of sidelining and side-swiping 58% of the highly credentialed talent pool.
Introduction
In 2003 a media firestorm exploded around a phenomenon called “The Opt-Out Revolution.” According to an October article by Lisa Belkin in The New York Times Magazine, highly educated women were abandoning their careers to become full-time wives and mothers. Other studies released around the same time seemed to confirm this trend: Talented women who had enjoyed every benefit in terms of education and opportunity didn’t want what their feminist mothers had fought so hard to win for them. They wanted what their grandmothers had had: a slower pace, more time with their kids, the old-fashioned rewards of being a mother first. Conservative commentators responded with a combination of indignation (“They’re throwing away their expensive educations! They’re abandoning the firms that hired and trained them! They’re wasting society’s
investment in them!”), and barely disguised glee (“Women don’t really want to work as hard as men do, they can’t hack it, and they belong at home with the babies”). Liberal commentators were distrusting and distraught: “Can this be true? If it is true, how can we explain this phenomenon without damaging years of women’s progress?”
After listening to the fuming and celebration and confusion and concern, and reviewing the scanty existing research, the Hidden Brain Drain, a private sector task force comprising 56 companies and organizations committed to the full realization of talent, decided to launch a study of its own. The goal was to step away from the hyperbole and finger-pointing and look at whether companies and organizations were, in fact, losing some of their most promising female employees, and, if so, why? Did some sort of postnatal rush of hormones undermine the resolve of these mothers? Were women truly less ambitious than men and did the arrival of children clarify this for them? Or were there other forces at play? Were women feeling pushed out of the workforce when they had children? Were employers making it difficult for women to sustain their previous levels of ambition after starting their families? If so, what were the pulls and the pushes? And what were the costs? Did it matter? Were the departing women easy to replace? Was it a case of no harm/no foul, with the only casualty being the treasured hopes of the women’s movement?
We wanted to know whether this phenomenon was more common in certain industries or sectors, and we were particularly interested in one dimension: Did the women who “opted out” intend to leave the workforce permanently? Or did they regard their shift toward motherhood as a temporary detour? If so, how long did women typically step out and how easy or hard was it for them to return? Did those who decided to go back to work hope to pick up where they left off or did they want something different? Lastly, were there certain kinds of programs or policies that made it easier for women to go back to work if they wanted to?
The Hidden Brain Drain Task Force
The Hidden Brain Drain Task Force—the flagship project of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a Manhattan-based think tank—kicked off the off-ramps and on-ramps research in 2004. In the summer of that year, EY, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers, three founding members of the Task Force, sponsored a survey which explored women’s nonlinear careers—focusing, in particular, on the factors that forced women off track, and those that allowed them to get back on track when they were ready. In partnership with Harris Interactive, we fielded a carefully designed questionnaire to a nationally representative group of 2,443 highly qualified women—and 653 of their male peers.
The resulting study, called “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success,”