duties.
Many of the women in our focus groups, regardless of their off-ramp status, report doing “double duty” at work and at home because their husbands also had demanding careers. (Women are more likely than men to have a spouse or partner who works full-time: 77% of women compared with 65% of men.) And when companies are unwilling to offer flexibility to full-time working women with childcare and/or eldercare responsibilities, the tugs and pulls of family can be so strong that many women feel that they have no choice but to leave.
Childlessness
Of course, not all women are married, and not all women have children. Over a quarter of the women in our sample were single and 38% of them were childless.
Interestingly, childlessness appears to be related to income. Women who are high earners—those who earn $75,000 or more annually—are less likely to have children than their lower earning counterparts.
Single, childless women still off-ramp in significant numbers: 14% of single, never-married women have taken a break at some point during their careers, as have 31% of women without children. Single and childless women off-ramp due to many of the same “push” factors as their married-with-children counterparts: 44% of childless off-rampers who left cited an unsatisfactory or disappointing career as a major factor in their decision to depart, while 28% said feeling stalled was a major factor.
It is also worth remembering that childlessness does not automatically equate to a lack of family responsibilities. For example, 21% of women without children off-ramp for eldercare responsibilities. Companies and managers would be wise not to take women for granted just because they don’t have a traditional family model at home. As we found in our “Bookend Generations” study, eldercare responsibilities tend to fall squarely on the unmarried sibling or one without children.9
Takeaways
The increasing importance of women as bread-winners has done little to equalize the role that women play in the home. Even when they are working full-time and earning more than their spouses or partners, a majority of women are still responsible for more than half of the household chores and childcare in their homes.
Women today are 28% more likely to have a nonworking spouse than they were five years ago.
Even as women become primary wage-earners, they continue to shoulder a disproportionate load of domestic responsibility: 39% of women who currently earn more than their spouses continue to handle most of the household responsibilities and childcare duties.
Single women and those without children are also tugged off-track by family responsibilities: 21% of women without children off-ramp for eldercare reasons.
* Data for 2001 comes from Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Norma Vite-León, High-Achieving Women, 2001 (New York: Center for Work-Life Policy/National Parenting Association, 2002).
Chapter 4
The Costs of Time Out
After a two-year break, it took Carly, a recently on-ramped focus group participant, three years to get back into the workplace. Even then, she was not sure of how the organization viewed her career prospects. “When I on-ramped, I felt that managers and HR recruiters didn’t understand me or my résumé. That hurt my chances for success a lot. It was almost as if they felt that I deserved to be put at a lower business level because I had left to raise a child.” Carly eventually took a job at a lower level upon returning—although not as low as was originally proposed. She still feels cheated: “I paid a huge price for off-ramping, and I resent it.”
The vast majority of off-ramping women want to reenter the workforce eventually. According to our new data, 89% of the women who are currently off-ramped want to resume their careers—a slight decrease since 2004, when the number was 93%, but still a robust figure.
However, in large part because of the penalties and barriers to reentry, many women who want to on-ramp are unable to do so. In 2004 and 2009, nearly the same number (74% in 2004, 73% in 2009) of women succeed in returning to their careers, and only 40% of those who do return to full-time, mainstream jobs. Another 23% end up employed in part-time jobs, and 7% become self-employed.
The average duration of an off-ramp is 2.7 years, although nearly three-quarters of women are ready to resume their careers after less than two years (see Figure 4.1). But even these brief time-outs are extremely costly, both in terms of compensation and career progression.
Returning off-rampers earn significantly less than women who have continuous work experience, as Figure 4.2 shows. Our data shows that, on average, women lose 16% of their earning power when they take an off-ramp. In the business sector, women’s earning power dips 11%.
Our findings in this area of financial penalties attached to time out jibe with the scholarly research. Economist Jane Waldfogel has analyzed the pattern of female earnings over the life span.10 When women enter the workforce in their early and mid-twenties, they earn nearly as much as men. For a few years, they continue to almost keep pace with men in terms of wages. At ages twenty-five to twenty-nine, women earn 87% of the male wage. However, when women hit their prime child-raising years (ages thirty to forty), many off-ramp for a short period of time—with disastrous consequences on the financial front. Largely because of these career interruptions, by the time they reach the 40 to 44 age group, women earn a mere 71% of the male wage.
The penalties of off-ramping are not exclusively financial. Figure 4.3 illustrates the tremendous hits to career progression resulting from taking a time out. Over a quarter of women report a decrease in their management responsibilities after on-ramping. A full 24% found their overall job responsibilities were curtailed upon returning to the workforce, and 22% of on-rampers had to step down to a lower job title than the one with which they had left.
Across the board, these declines in career progression have actually become even more severe since we fielded our original survey. This disturbing pattern is likely the result of a pipeline increasingly clogged by senior-level Baby Boomers staying longer in their jobs in an attempt to restore recession-ravaged retirement accounts.11 There are fewer job openings at the upper levels that would-be on-rampers had inhabited before they left.
Longer Workweeks and Extreme Jobs
Long workweeks, high levels of stress, and onerous travel requirements have become standard characteristics of high-echelon jobs. Employees, particularly at senior levels, are expected to be available to clients, colleagues, and superiors 24/7. The recession has only ratcheted up the pressure, with workers expected to do more with less.
Nearly one-third of the women in our survey reported that they were working 50 hours a week or more. Meanwhile, 9% of the women traveled for work more than five nights per month, a number that can prove unmanageable for mothers of young children.
Driven by a fiercely competitive, gut-churning economy, women across
