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.
Chapter 1
Women Continue to Off-Ramp
Women 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;
