How to keep women on the path to success By Sylvia Ann Hewlett
This year there has been much controversy over "opt-out" women who choose to leave the workforce. By now we have all read a shrill magazine story or watched some talking head bemoaning or celebrating a return to hearth and home. Even the popularity of the TV show Desperate Housewives has been attributed to legions of highly qualified women newly marooned in domesticity.
To date, this noisy debate has yielded little in the way of new insight or solutions, at least in part because of the absence of hard data. No one seems to know the basic facts: How many highly qualified women opt out? For how many years do they stay out? And how many want to get back in?
We can now answer these questions. This week, the Harvard Business Review publishes an article entitled "Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success" and an accompanying research report. Based on the work of the Hidden Brain Drain taskforce (a group of 19 global companies that have come together to determine how to nurture talent over a lifespan), these studies enable us to paint a much more comprehensive portrait of female career paths than previously possible.
Among the findings are that 37 per cent of highly qualified women voluntarily leave their careers at some point and a further 21 per cent take flexible or reduced hour options. Almost 60 per cent of these women describe their careers as non-linear.
In addition, among women who leave their careers, the overwhelming majority (93 per cent) want to return to work. However, only 74 per cent of those who want to rejoin the ranks of the employed manage to do so.
Another finding is that women leave their careers for a surprisingly short period of time - on average 2.2 years. But even these relatively short interruptions entail heavy financial penal ties. On average, women lose 18 per cent of their earning power when they temporarily leave their careers and the figure rises to a staggering 37 per cent when they spend three years or more out.
These findings underscore the frustration of talented women sidelined by the rigidity of career paths. The underlying survey data are American (the sample is 2,443 highly qualified women from various sectors) but accords with what we know of the UK scene. Earlier this month, the Equal Opportunities Commission published a report called "Part-time is no crime - so why the penalty?", which details the price paid by British women who leave their careers or reduce their hours.
Why should employers pay attention? Companies need to devote urgent efforts to retaining highly qualified women because a "war for talent" is looming. Consider the following: after a two-year "jobless recovery", labour markets are beginning to tighten on both sides of the Atlantic; the much smaller generation born in the 1970s is about to hit its prime with the number of workers in the 35-45 year-old age group shrinking; and productivity improvements are flattening out. Add to this a reduction in female employment (due to the failure of employers to adapt to women's non-linear careers, labour force participation rates for mothers are going down in both the US and the UK) and you have a problem.
It is fascinating to see how companies (such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers) in notoriously tough sectors, as well as companies (such as Ernst & Young) in easier to deal with sectors are grappling with questions such as: how do you structure a career so that a woman has a second shot at success? How do you enable women to feel comfortable with taking advantage of existing work-life policies? And how do you tame highly demanding jobs? In many cases, these companies are striving to go beyond creating opportunities for women to the much more difficult challenge of nurturing female talent over the long haul.
A drum beat that reverberates through this new research is commitment to career. Sure, a large percentage of highly qualified women take detours from their careers but the vast majority cannot wait to get back in. The women in these studies talk eloquently about how work provides shape and meaning to their lives, and is at the core of their identities.
This finding should be profoundly comforting to employers developing new policy. Desperate Housewives notwithstanding, women are fiercely committed to their careers and, given the chance, will stick with them.
The writer is director of the Hidden Brain Drain taskforce, and of the gender and policy programme at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs