reduce their hours, move to a less-demanding position, or decline a promotion before signaling their desire to return to the fast lane. Others turn to flexible work arrangements and telecommuting to manage a tricky work-life balancing act for a period of time.
In our original study, 58% of respondents described their career paths as nonlinear. In 2009, the number slipped slightly—a fallout of the economic downturn—but it is still an impressive 55%.
As Figures 1.5 and 1.6 illustrate, significant numbers of highly qualified women downshift to a less-demanding career model. However, in response to the challenging job environment, fewer women overall are taking a scenic option and a sizable number (42% versus 34%) report “staying on track”—meaning they are following the arc of a traditional male career.
The most significant change between 2004 and 2009 is in the percentage of women who reduced the number of work hours within a full-time job, as can be seen from Figure 1.6, dropping from 25% of women in the 2004 survey to 15% in 2009. Why such a visible decline? Between the rise of extreme jobs in the American workplace and the threat of recession-prompted layoffs ratcheting up face-time pressure, reducing work hours is simply not an option for many professional women today.7
Flexible work arrangements offer some relief. Currently, 18% of both men and women take advantage of flexible work arrangements at their companies. The most common option is “flextime,” which allows variation in the start and stop times of the workday: employees continue to work full-time schedules, but have some choice as to when work is done. For example, a woman on a flextime schedule might start her workday at 7 a.m. in order to pick up her kids from school at 4 p.m. Telecommuting is catching on, too, as companies reduce real estate costs by cutting back on office space: 5% of women and 7% of men now work from their home or another remote location. Other options include compressed workweeks in which a full workweek is condensed into a shorter number of long-hour days—especially popular during the summer—and reduced-hour arrangements, in which they work fewer hours with a reduced workload.
Still, the vast majority of both women and men (82%) maintain traditional work arrangements. Many do so because of a lack of flexible work options within their companies. But even when flextime exists, not everyone is permitted to take it. A financial services executive said that she had been told that flex wasn’t an option in her current role.
Another challenge is that flexible work arrangements are still stigmatized in many organizations. Eighteen percent of men and 28% of women who were on flexible work arrangements said that they felt taking flex would curtail their chances of career advancement. One focus group participant explained, “I switched jobs because I was promised flex and a four-day week. In reality, I worked five, and sometimes six, days a week, with no flex, but I was labeled a flex worker. When the company merged, I got downsized. I’m sure my working ‘flex’ had something to do with it.”
A Word About Men
Off-ramping is not limited to women. Although today’s women are approximately twice as likely to take an off-ramp as men, a full 16% of men report that they have taken a time-out at some point in their careers. As with the figures for women, this percentage has dropped slightly since 2004 (see Figure 1.7).
Men also influence their spouses’ off-
ramping decisions. Seventy percent of the women who took time off said their husbands or partners supported their decision—in fact, nearly two-thirds (65%) felt they were enthusiastically supportive—especially when they off-ramped for childcare reasons (see Figure 1.8). “My husband was very supportive of my decision to off-ramp,” a former financial services executive told us. “We felt that raising our children was a top priority, and 24/7 nannies were a no-go for us.”
But other women report that their spouses’ reactions to their off-ramp were more ambivalent. Alanna, a mid-level manager told us that when she off-ramped, “My husband was worried that if I left I wouldn’t get back in. We both knew that we couldn’t afford for me to stop working forever, but we also knew that it would be good for the kids if I were home for a bit. At the time, I thought he was being particularly unreasonable, but it turns out that he wasn’t wrong to be concerned. My journey back to working has taken longer and been more difficult than I could have imagined.”
Other husbands express their disapproval more strongly: 30% of women polled feel their husbands are not supportive—they are either envious or angry with their wives’ decision. Money matters loom large, with nearly a quarter (23%) saying husbands are worried about the financial implications of their wives’ decision to quit. Men may feel resentful of the extra wage-earning pressure being placed on them when their wives leave the workplace, particularly if money is already a point of tension in the home.
Takeaways
If you add together the off-rampers and the scenic routers, a majority of highly qualified women have nonlinear careers. The figure was somewhat higher in 2004 than 2009, but even in 2009 nearly three out of five (58%) high-echelon women experience these career interruptions and fail to conjure up the lock step patterns of traditional male careers.
Most of the time, an off-ramp is a one-time occurrence in a woman’s career.
The majority of off-ramps coincide with a woman’s child-bearing years: the mean age at which women take an off-ramp is 31.
Significant numbers of women still take a scenic route: they reduce their hours, move to a less-demanding position, decline a promotion or use flexible work arrangements.
54%
Chapter 2
The Reasons Why
After the birth of her second child, Grace found it hard to deal with the pressures of her job as an executive at a large technology company. She lived on the East Coast, and with most of her team in California, after-hours conference calls were an almost daily occurrence. To make matters worse, her husband had a similarly demanding job in the finance industry. The couple had trouble finding a nanny able to accommodate their long and unpredictable hours. Tempers were frequently frayed, and Grace sometimes wondered if she were stretched to the breaking point.
Grace’s company offered flexible work arrangements, and Grace negotiated a change in her schedule, working reduced hours for four days a week while retaining her senior-level title and responsibilities. Even though she cut back from working 60 hours a week to 45 hours, she wasn’t able to spend the time she wanted with her kids. Finally, she decided to off-ramp.
Over a year later, Grace loves being at home with her kids. “I think I’m more tired now, but it’s a happy tired,” she says. She and her husband are getting along better, too: “Before, I was working full-time at work and at home. Now it feels like my husband and I are equals.” She wants to go back to work once her kids enter kindergarten, but not to a frenzied job in the technology sector.
What prompts so many ambitious, highly qualified women to take time out of their careers? There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all explanation for why women off-ramp. Career breaks are, for most, the result of a complex interaction between “pull factors” (centered on family and personal
