Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success - Hardcover

Hewlett, Sylvia Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1422101029 ISBN 13: 9781422101025

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 2007

Synopsis

With talent shortages looming over the next decade, what can companies do to attract and retain the large number of professional women who are forced off the career highway?

By documenting the successful efforts of a group of cutting-edge global companies to retain talented women and reintegrate them if they’ve already left, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps answers this critical question. Working closely with companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, General Electric and others, author Sylvia Ann Hewlett identifies what works and why. Based on firsthand experience with these companies, along with extensive data that provides the most comprehensive and nuanced portrait of women's career paths, this book documents the actions forward-thinking companies must take to reverse the female brain drain and ensure their access to talent over the long term.

About this title

About the Author

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is the founding President of the Center for Work-Life Policy and the Director of the Gender and Public Policy Program at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. Her books include When the Bough Breaks, Creating a Life, and The War Against Parents (co-authored with Cornel West). Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Harvard Business Review. She has taught at Cambridge, Columbia, and Princeton Universities. She has appeared on 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Good Morning America, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, Newsnight with Aaron Brown, NBC Nightly News, Oprah, The View, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation—and has been lampooned on Saturday Night Live. A Kennedy Scholar and graduate of Cambridge University, Hewlett earned her PhD in economics at London Univerisity.

From the Back Cover

How to Keep Your Talent On Track

Legions of professional women step off the career fast track at least once to raise children, care for their elderly parents, or manage other family demands. But when they’re ready to step back on track—just a short time later—they hit a wall On-ramps are few and far between, and the financial penalties for “time out” are punishing. Result? Many women are lost on reentry, and companies miss the chance to leverage this talent pool.

With talent shortages looming over the next decade, companies must reverse this female brain drain if they hope to beat rivals. But how can companies attract and retain professional women? Off-Ramps and On-Ramps answers this critical question by documenting the successful efforts of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force—a group of thirty-four leading edge global companies including General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Lehman Brothers, and Time Warner. Spearheaded by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, over the past three years the task force has developed and driven eighteen best-practice models for companies seeking to recruit, retain and reattach talented women. In this book, you’ll find strategies for:

Providing arc-of-career flexibility that enables women to “ramp down” and then “ramp up” without losing traction?

Combating the stigma that all too often undermines alternative work arrangements

Helping women claim and sustain ambition

Off-Ramps and On-Ramps is based on first hand experience with gold-standard companies and is grounded in extensive new data that provides the most comprehensive and nuanced picture of women’s career paths to date. A vital resource, this book smashes a “male competitive model” that has too long insisted on smooth, cumulative lockstep careers as a prerequisite for success— to the detriment of ambitious women and talent hungry companies everywhere.

Reviews

Despite advances in women's rights, as well as telecommuting, job sharing and flex-work, the components of corporate advancement have been largely unchanged since the 1950s; according to author and economist Hewlett (Creating a Life), these outdated criteria are decidedly stacked against women: lock step progression, face time, unreasonable hours, flattery and obeisance, golf and strip clubs and male bonding. The 60 percent of women workers who take a career-path detour ("off-ramp"), typically for family reasons, are welcomed back with un- or underemployment. Meanwhile, traditional male incentives-money and power-don't hold the same appeal for women, leading to substantial attrition rates among the business's upper echelons. Although Hewlett is admirably thorough in her research of "off ramping" as a strategy for women, and provides plenty of real-world examples, she's unconcerned with the larger implications for workers of either gender; though the female focus doesn't detract, it may leave readers with some unanswered questions (why should any employee withstand what resembles fraternity hazing just to get ahead?). Nevertheless, Hewlett looks at all areas of a constrictive work environment and offers intelligent solutions for reaching one's full potential within it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

It is difficult not only to pinpoint the issues behind female "opt-outs" from the workforce but also to cite pragmatic, business- and women-friendly programs and policies that will retain female talent. Economist Hewlett, a workplace expert, author (When the Bough Breaks, 1991; The War against Parents, 1999; and Creating a Life, 2002), and recently cofounder of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, has blueprinted a new second-generation road map to success. Not content with merely chronicling the reasons for nonlinear discontinuous careers (ranging from motherhood to elder-care demands), she articulates the dramatic business case for diversity--retaining intellectual "goods," keeping an impressive amount of capacity, and diverse teams making better decisions--then identifies six elements critical to retention. Each of those six--flex-work arrangements, arc-of-career flexibility, reimagination of work life, continuation of ambition, harnessing of activism, and reduction of stigmas and stereotypes--is buttressed by actual corporate case studies, and a "toolkit" sidebar that captures the business case, how to begin, and critical elements. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1422101029
• ISBN 13: 9781422101025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 299