Brainpower. Sylvia Ann Hewlett
continue to off-ramp for a variety of reasons. Childcare issues dominate (the birth of a second child, wanting to spend more time with a teenager), but eldercare challenges and burnout can also trigger an off-ramping decision: Kathrin’s decision to leave her management consulting job was spurred by the death of her father and the failing health of her mother.5 In addition to dealing with the day-to-day medical problems of her mother, she found herself embroiled in sorting out a legal dispute connected to her mother’s estate. “I took a few years off to help my mother,” she says. “I really needed that time off.”
Amy, on the other hand, left her job in the financial sector due to burnout. “I was at the promotion point in my job and I was really questioning whether I wanted to continue in this career.” She had a difficult time coping with the unpredictable hours and constantly feeling like she was missing the things she wanted in life. “I off-ramped to assess what I really wanted. I traveled—something I had not been able to do since I started working at 22. For the first time in 15 years, I took some time to reflect and evaluate.”
In our new survey we found that many highly qualified women continue to off-ramp—take a voluntary, non-job guaranteed leave of six months or more—at some point in their careers. However, between 2004 and 2009, the number of women who off-ramped dropped slightly 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 women’s earnings in family budgets (many simply cannot afford to take time out).
Although the numbers of off-rampers have slipped overall, in our survey women in business are slightly more likely to take time out than they were in 2004 (35% in 2009 versus 30% in 2004). Conversely, fewer women in the banking and finance sector opted for a break, reflecting the insecurity rife in an industry especially hard-hit by the recession (see Figure 1.2).
Most of the time, an off-ramp is a one-time occurrence in a woman’s career: 63% of the women in our 2009 survey had off-ramped only once over the course of their careers and 24% had done it twice. Only 13% had taken more than two time-outs (see Figure 1.3).
It’s no coincidence that the mean age at which women take their first off-ramp is 31. The majority of off-ramps occur in the 25-34 year-old age range—prime child-bearing years for college-educated women. As MIT economist Lester Thurow points out, “These are the prime years for establishing a successful career. These are the years when hard work has the maximum payoff. They are also the prime years for launching a family.”6 Not surprisingly, 54% of our respondents take their first off-ramp at the age when the twin demands of career and children simultaneously skyrocket.
Scenic Routes
Rhonda, an electrical engineer, spent the first 18 years of her career climbing the corporate ladder. She worked long hours, traveled at a moment’s notice when a crashing system required her attention, and was “on call” one week a month to deal with middle-of-the-night emergencies. After she had children, though, these round-the-clock demands became much harder to deal with. Being called back to the plant at 8 p.m. used to be an inconvenience; now it could interrupt her daughter’s bedtime routine. “There started to be a much bigger gap between my coworkers, who were all male, and me,” Rhonda recalls. “They all had stay-at-home wives and everything was easier for them.”
Rhonda loved her job and her family, and didn’t want to sacrifice one for the other. Earlier in her career she had seen two other senior women work part-time, and, as Rhonda explained, “Knowing that they were able to do it gave me the courage to pursue it.” She wasn’t sure whether her boss would agree that she could reduce her hours and continue to supervise ten people, but to her relief, he agreed to let her cut back to an 80% schedule and keep her job.
A majority of highly qualified women describe their careers as nonlinear. The lock step cumulative progression of a traditional male career model, with the steepest gradient occurring in the decade of one’s thirties, does not describe how most women move through their professional lives. While not every woman is able—or willing—to take a full off-ramp, plenty choose to temporarily downshift and take a “scenic route.” These women don’t “opt out” of the workforce entirely; rather, for a limited time, they ease up on the accelerator
and reduce their hours, move to a less-demanding position, or decline a promotion before signaling their desire to return to the fast lane. Others turn to flexible work arrangements and telecommuting to manage a tricky work-life balancing act for a period of time.
In our original study, 58% of respondents described their career paths as nonlinear. In 2009, the number slipped slightly—a fallout of the economic downturn—but it is still an impressive 55%.
As Figures 1.5 and 1.6 illustrate, significant numbers of highly qualified women downshift to a less-demanding career model. However, in response to the challenging job environment, fewer women overall are taking a scenic option and a sizable number (42% versus 34%) report “staying on track”—meaning they are following the arc of a traditional male career.
The most significant change between 2004 and 2009 is in the percentage of women who reduced the number of work hours within a full-time job, as can be seen from Figure 1.6, dropping from 25% of women in the 2004 survey to 15% in 2009. Why such a visible decline? Between the rise of extreme jobs in the American workplace and the threat of recession-prompted layoffs ratcheting up face-time pressure, reducing work hours is simply not an option for many professional women today.7
Flexible work arrangements offer some relief. Currently, 18% of both men and women take advantage of flexible work arrangements at their companies. The most common option is “flextime,” which allows variation in the start and stop times of the workday: employees continue to work full-time schedules, but have some choice as to when work is done. For example, a woman on a flextime schedule might start her workday at 7 a.m. in order to pick up her kids from school at 4 p.m. Telecommuting is catching on, too, as companies reduce real estate costs by cutting back on office space: 5% of women and 7% of men now work from their home or another remote location. Other options include compressed workweeks in which a full workweek is condensed into a shorter number of long-hour days—especially popular during the summer—and reduced-hour arrangements, in which they work fewer hours with a reduced workload.
Still, the vast majority of both women and men (82%) maintain traditional work arrangements. Many do so because of a lack of flexible work options within their companies. But even when flextime exists, not everyone is permitted to take it. A financial services executive said that she had been told that flex wasn’t an option in her current role.
Another challenge is that flexible work arrangements are still stigmatized in many organizations. Eighteen percent of men and 28% of women who were on flexible work arrangements said that they felt taking flex would curtail their chances of career advancement. One focus group participant explained, “I switched jobs because I was promised flex and a four-day week. In reality, I worked five, and sometimes six, days a week, with no flex, but I was labeled a flex worker. When the company merged, I got downsized. I’m sure my working ‘flex’ had something to do with it.”
A Word About Men
Off-ramping is not limited to women. Although today’s women are approximately twice as likely to take an off-ramp as men, a full 16% of men report that they have taken a time-out at some point in their careers. As with the figures for women, this percentage has dropped slightly since 2004 (see Figure 1.7).