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
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
