Opening the On-Ramp for Women

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/business/05shelf.html?_r=1&ref=yourmoney&oref=slogin


By STEPHEN KOTKIN
Published: August 5, 2007
Indeed, even though 59 percent of recent undergraduate degrees are held by women, more than 90 percent of the top earners at Fortune 500 companies are men. Sylvia Ann Hewlett has made it her mission to change that.

Dr. Hewlett, an economist, directs the gender and public policy program at Columbia University, then persuaded 34 companies employing 2.5 million people to participate in a “Hidden Brain Drain” task force.

“Why is it,” the task force asked, “that after decades of creating opportunities for women and proactively nurturing diversity, companies are still struggling with the challenge of retaining and advancing women?” Dr. Hewlett provides an answer in her new book, “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps” (Harvard Business School Press, $29.95).

The surveys show that while 45 percent of women who take an off-ramp from their careers face child-care challenges and another 24 percent have elder-care duties, almost one-third take a break solely because their partner’s income is enough to support the household. Women use the off-ramp because they can.


Dr. Hewlett brings to bear a great deal of evidence to support her contention that professional women are held back by an outdated career model designed for white men with wives at home.

White men are “a segment of the talent pool that is shrinking,” Jeremy Isaacs, chief executive for Europe and Asia at Lehman Brothers, tells her. In fact, the number of men with graduate degrees is projected to grow by just 1.3 percent over the next decade, compared with 16 percent for women, according to the Education Department. Small wonder that Mr. Isaacs says he “would absolutely take three days a week of someone who is truly talented.”

For an employer to allow flexibility, in other words, is not a luxury; it is necessary for marketplace survival.

Written as both advocacy and practical guide, the book offers suggestions to employers: establish a rich menu of flexible work and career arrangements, reimagine work-life issues (for example, offer benefits for elder care and not just child care), Chapter after chapter illustrates how companies like Ernst & Young, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Johnson & Johnson and American Express are experimenting with these approaches. And through Dr. Hewlett’s cross-company task force, they are sharing their successes. There’s movement.

Dr. Hewlett notes that, according to the surveys, the percentage of women in banking and finance who had used an off-ramp, and who wanted to return to their former employers, was zero.