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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,” was published in March 2005 by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) as both an article and a report. It was the first of six Hidden Brain Drain Task Force studies to be published by the HBR in the 2005-2010 period—all of which explored how to fully utilize talent across the divides of gender, generation and culture.1

Highlights of Original Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Research

The data collected in 2004 allowed us to construct a detailed picture of women’s career paths. We discovered that 37% of highly qualified women did take an off-ramp, voluntarily quitting their jobs—for a period of time. Forty-five percent of highly qualified women reported being pulled off track by child care issues. To a lesser but still significant degree, women were also pulled away from their jobs by the demands of eldercare and by personal health issues.

We also identified a number of pushes—negative aspects of the work environment that force women out. Pushes included feeling as though their jobs were insufficiently stimulating or satisfying. Only a tiny proportion (6%) of these highly qualified women left because they found their work too demanding or felt they weren’t up to it. Many of those who felt pushed out left because they saw little opportunity for advancement. They felt stalled or stuck.

Whether pulled or pushed, few women made an off-ramping decision easily or without regrets. Most of them had invested heavily in their careers in terms of both money and time, and the work they did was a big part of their identities—it defined how they saw themselves in relation to the world and to themselves. They derived satisfaction from being good at what they did and liked the independence that went with a significant income. Walking away from this package of rewards was not easy.

We discovered that off-ramped women almost universally planned to return to work: fully 93% of highly qualified women who interrupted their careers expected to resume them. The reasons were manifold: their partner’s income was no longer sufficient to support the family’s lifestyle, they wished to go back to work they loved, or they missed contributing to society through their work.

Sadly, we discovered that on-ramping was far more difficult than many anticipated. Only 74% of women who had off-ramped managed to get any kind of job at all, and a mere 40% managed to get a full-time mainstream job. Of the rest, 24% took part-time jobs, and a small number (9%) became self-employed. This was true even though women took surprisingly short breaks when they off-ramped: on average, they were out of the workforce for only 2.2 years; in business sectors, they were out for even less time—on average, 1.2 years.

Even such short interruptions took a huge toll on earnings. Women lost an average of 18% of their earning power when they off-ramped, and this figure was higher in business sectors where even a brief interruption cost a woman 28% of her earning power. Longer interruptions were more costly still: across all sectors women lost an average of 37% of their earnings if they spent three or more years out of the workforce.

Our 2004 research unearthed other interesting facts. Highly qualified men and women were motivated by different things. Men focused on money and power while women tended to prioritize high-quality colleagues, flexibility, recognition, and “give back” to community. It’s not that women were less ambitious than men, we realized. Women simply constructed their ambition differently. They weren’t interested in professional success that left no room for family or community engagement, and they defined success less in terms of money and power and more in terms of the quality of the people they work with and the meaning of the work they did.

Action Agenda

Much of the work of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force in the 2004-2007 period centered on developing solutions—crafting programs and policies that responded to the challenges highlighted by our study. As described in Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s 2007 book Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, on this action front the Task Force companies were able to hammer out a collective vision.2 We’re not talking about a detailed or tight agenda here—the range of sectors and occupations represented in the Task Force is too wide for that—but we did achieve a meeting of the minds. There was consensus on a core package: six essential elements that need to gain some real traction if a company is to fully realize female talent over the long haul.

So what is this action-packed core package?

 Providing scenic routes

 Creating flex over the arc of a career

 Reimagining work-life

 Helping women claim and sustain ambition

 Tapping into altruism

 Combating the stigma associated with flexible work arrangements

As we discovered in our most recent research, these action steps remain extremely relevant today. (See new programs and policies described in Chapter 7, “Action Agenda.”)

Impact of the Original Research

The Harvard Business Review article, report3 and the Harvard Business School Press book were well received and as the concept of nonlinear careers and the relevance of off-ramps and on-ramps percolated through media, these studies became the subject of literally hundreds of articles in publications which ran the gamut from the elite business press to general interest newspapers; from internationally respected news outlets to titles rarely recognized outside their country’s borders; and from traditional tribunes to trendy blogs and websites. The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, BusinessWeek and The Guardian, as well as St. Paul Pioneer Press, San Antonio Express-News, Chicago Tribune, icWales: The National Website of Wales, Pittsburgh Business Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada, The Seattle Times, The Toronto Star, Hindustan Times, South China Morning Post, and The Huffington Post all featured our research on off-ramps and on-ramps.

On a more scholarly level, management theorists and executive strategists woke up to the scope and significance of women’s nonlinear careers and used our research as a springboard for a series of well-regarded books: Why Women Mean Business by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland; Opting Out by Pamela Stone; Mothers on the Fast Track by Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman; and Back on the Career Track by Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin, to name a few.

Most importantly perhaps, the swelling interest in off-ramps and on-ramps drove new action on the ground—which went well beyond Task Force companies. Since the publication of the Harvard Business Review article in 2005, more than 50 corporations and organizations around the world have initiated on-ramping programs to help women relaunch their careers.4

Some of the more robust on-ramping programs included GE’s Restart initiative in Bangalore, India, which focused on welcoming back to work women scientists and engineers who had taken time out; Goldman Sachs’s New Directions initiative, which targeted top female talent attempting to reenter the financial sector; and Bank of America’s Greater Returns program, developed in partnership with the Columbia Business School, which helped women deal with both on-ramping and up-ramping challenges.

These days the phrase “off-ramps and on-ramps” turns up 1,280,000 hits on Google—convincing proof that this idea has entered the zeitgeist!

Reasons for a New Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Study

Since the original off-ramp and on-ramp studies were published, the competitive landscape has been reshaped by a massive global economic contraction. In addition, women are newly challenged by greater financial responsibility—for themselves and their families—increasingly facing work “days” that stretch 24/7. Are these forces changing career paths and reshaping off-ramps and on-ramps?

We decided to take a second look. In the spring of 2009, we refielded a slightly expanded version of the original survey, reaching a total of 3,420 highly qualified respondents, including 2,728 women and 692 men. In doing so, we managed to

recapture some of the respondents from the original survey. In addition, we were able to expand the survey to include a section on the impact of the recession on off-ramping decisions. We also augmented our survey data with Insights In Depth® (virtual brainstorming sessions), traditional focus groups, and one-on-one interviews.