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Foreword

My son’s second birthday was a turning point for me—though not for the reasons a new mother would hope. Just as the festivities were getting underway, I received an urgent call from my editor at The Times of London. Two Dartmouth College professors had been murdered. Would I hasten to Hanover, New Hampshire to cover the breaking story?

I said yes. I didn’t feel as though I had a choice: If I didn’t take the assignment, I wouldn’t lose my job, but I would certainly lose out on opportunities that would propel my career forward. On the way out of our apartment building, I saw my husband, literally just arriving home from South Africa, and told him he would have to take over for a couple of days and that we had 20 people coming for our son’s party that afternoon. Within hours I was in Hanover, interviewing members of the community and probing the details of a grisly story. I worked all night. At 5 a.m., I filed my story. I’d met the deadline. A career crisis averted, I thought.

Then I got another call from my editor. He loved the story, but he wasn’t going to run it until the end of the week.

I’d missed my son’s birthday for nothing.

That was the moment when I realized these two lifestyles were incompatible. I understood that something had to change, and the impetus was on me to figure out what.

Every working mother I know has had to negotiate a similar fork in the road. Do you take an “off-ramp”—quit your job, take care of your kids, and promise yourself you’ll return when the circumstances are more forgiving? Do you take a detour, a lesser road but one that will likely get you to your destination, albeit a little later? Or do you just soldier on and hope your resources on the home front compensate for your absence?

I took an editing job, one that promised regular hours and a schedule I could manage as the mother of a toddler and a newborn. I didn’t particularly enjoy the work; there were countless days where, addled with exhaustion, I toyed with the idea of quitting, just so I could get some sleep. Many of my friends had quit, friends I had once thought more ambitious than me. But I chose to muscle through, not just for the money but because I knew that eventually I wanted to run something.

Today, as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, I see that as the right decision. But I see our readers at the very same crossroads that I encountered some ten years ago, contemplating options just as stark. With a promising career and a child or two, what is the way forward? Is an off-ramp the only way, as Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton professor who recently renounced her State Department post to return home, so passionately maintains? What are the penalties of doing so? How might they vary, depending on your industry? Or is it indeed possible to forge a compromise, one that allows you to have it all—eventually, and on your own terms?

Fortunately, for them and for you, there’s guidance. Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Revisited proves to be as groundbreaking in its research and as relevant with its findings as it was in 2005 when the Center for Talent Innovation (then the Center for Work-Life Policy) first published the study. The research not only perfectly captures the ongoing problem of “nonlinear” career trajectories, it also maps a path to recovering from them. Since CTI’s original survey, published by Harvard Business Review Press as “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps,” more than 70 corporations and institutions have initiated on-ramping programs to help women regain their footing on the corporate ladder. Provided the option of “scenic career routes”—flexible work arrangements such as reduced-hour options and telecommuting—women return to full-time work with redoubled energy and commitment, CTI demonstrates. Not only are these solutions eminently affordable, given the improved retention of high-potential women, they’re increasingly absent from the stigma often associated with flexible work arrangements. That’s news highly ambitious women need to hear, as so many choose to quit their jobs rather than seek flexible 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