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, economist and founding President of the Centre for Work-Life Policy, is the Director of the Gender and Public Policy Program at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.

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.

From the Inside Flap

Increasingly, today's professional careers mostly advance professionals with no gaps in their resume, who can survive workweeks lengthened by global hours and 24/7 blackberry culture, and who can intensify their efforts in their thirties. These heightening demands are out of touch with the reality of women's lives. According to Hewlett's study of 2,400 women, two-thirds of highly qualified women "off-ramp"--voluntarily leave their careers to devote themselves full time to family. Others "take scenic routes"--reduced-hour or flexible work. These women want to return to full-time work and advance their careers, but today's career model excludes them. The trend is increasing just when today's talent shortage makes qualified women more valuable than ever.

The good news is that pioneering companies like American Express, British Telecom, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco, Citigroup, Ernst & Young, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Lehman Brothers,and Time Warner are reengineering jobs to create a more sustainable career model for women. At these companies Hewlett has driven a second generation policy and practice that reinvents the work week, encourages on-ramping, and ends the stigma of off-ramping. Hewlett tells the instructive stories of these companies and the inspiring stories of brave women who found fulfilment from their careers after off-ramping.

Hewlett also includes her own personal story as a mother who off-ramped and on-ramped, and as the daughter of a courageous woman whose livelihood was saved by an on-ramp at a time when few women worked at all.

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