Pit Stops and Scenic Routes: How to Aid Women to Stay on Track in Their Careers
Publication: Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 8, Issue 1
Abstract
Since 2000, the percentage of married mothers with infants and small children in the workforce has fallen an average of 5 percent. Should we care if women leave the workforce? If talented women choose to “off ramp,” their participation in public life is gone, along with their talents and their ability to positively impact society. Once they leave, they usually cannot regain the income or status they had. Women lose an average of 18 percent of their earning power when they temporarily leave the workforce, with women in professional sectors losing a greater percentage. Despite the media talk of “on ramps,” only 40 percent of high-powered professional women get back to full-time work after taking leave, usually at a significant pay reduction. With engineers in demand, many employers are finding it very important to lure “off-ramped” talent back into the workforce. This article explores potential solutions with a focus on policies that allow women and men the flexibility that life sometimes demands, be it time for young children, getting an advanced degree, or caring for an aging parent.
What do my aerobics instructor, my daughters’ swim coach, their girl scout leader, and my (former) daycare provider have in common? Yes, they are women. Surprisingly, all four of them are—or, more correctly, were—engineers. These women opted to off-ramp after they married and had children in order to devote more time to their families. All four returned to work once their children went to school, but chose to work part time in traditional female occupations, making a fraction of what they would make as engineers. After fifteen to twenty years out of the engineering workforce, not one feels capable of returning to engineering.
The Problem
Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake, says that these women, and women like them, are putting themselves and their families at risk. If they lost the income of the sole breadwinning spouse through divorce, downsizing, or death, these women could find themselves and their families living at or below poverty level. Nor is raising a family the only reason women off-ramp. Eldercare is even more sex-based, with women doing 85 percent of eldercare compared to 73 percent of childcare (Bennetts 2007).
A 2004 national survey of 3,096 highly qualified men and women sponsored by the Center for Work-Life Policy found that in today’s workplace, 37 percent of highly qualified women surveyed voluntarily left their careers for an average period of time of 2.2 years. “Highly qualified” was defined as having a graduate or professional degree. Furthermore, 93 percent of highly qualified women currently off-ramped want to return to their careers. Most do not understand how difficult ramping back on will be; only 74 percent manage to return to the workforce. Of those, 40 percent return full time, 24 percent part time, and 9 percent become self-employed. Women returning to work lose an average of 18 percent of their earning power; this percentage increases as the number of years off-ramped increases. Financial penalties are not limited to individuals. There are financial costs to the employer associated with high turnover. One dramatic finding of the survey is that only 5 percent of off-ramped women want to return to their previous employer. The vast majority of these women feel that they were not supported in those last months on the job (Steiner 2007).
This is happening at the same time the labor market is tightening. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 90 percent of employers say competition for college hires has increased. As baby boomers retire and foreign nationals increasingly leave the United States for job opportunities in their home countries created by the new global economy, it has become more important to hire and retain female talent.
Why Employees Leave
Off-ramping is not limited to women. Survey data indicate that 24 percent of highly qualified men voluntarily leave their careers for a period of time. The reasons are different for off-ramped men and women (see Table 1). For women, the primary reason for off-ramping is family responsibilities; career repositioning is the primary reason for men.Table 1. Why Do Employees Leave?
| Women | Men | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time for children | 45% | Career change | 29% |
| Partner’s income sufficient | 32% | Earn degree | 25% |
| Career not satisfying | 29% | Career not satisfying | 24% |
| Eldercare | 24% | Not interested in field | 18% |
| Stalled in career | 23% | Time for children | 12% |
Note: Multiple responses allowed.
What Women Want
Many women have financial reasons for wanting to return to work, but there are many other reasons (see Table 2). Table 2 also offers insight into what women in the workforce want from a career. A full 60 percent of highly qualified women have nonlinear career paths. Most either off-ramp or take the “scenic route” (work part time, avoid or delay promotions, telecommute, etc.). This career arc differs from the traditionally successful (male) career model that is one of continuous, linear, full-time, many-weekly-hours employment whose primary “carrots” are money and status/power. Clearly, the data indicates that women differ greatly from men in what they want from their careers, with collaboration, collegiality, and giving back to society big motivators. Successfully getting more women into, or back into, the workforce pipeline will require second-generation policies that provide alternative pathways for employees with nonlinear work lives, says Sylvia Hewlett, author of Off-Ramps and On-Ramps (NBC Today 2007).Table 2. Why Do Women On-Ramp and What Do They Want from Their Careers?
| Why women on-ramp | What women want from a career | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal source of income | 46% | High-quality colleagues | 82% |
| Satisfaction of career | 43% | “Be myself” (work identity) | 79% |
| Give back to society | 24% | Flexibility | 64% |
| Partner’s income insufficient | 24% | Collaboration and teamwork | 61% |
| Family needs less time | 19% | Give back to society | 56% |
| Regain status/power | 16% | Recognition | 51% |
| Change in marital status | 7% | High income | 42% |
| Friendships at work | 6% | Powerful position | 15% |
Note: Multiple responses allowed.
Solutions
Since 2004, thirty-four progressive global companies became members of the Hidden Brain Drain Taskforce, whose objective was to identify problems and sponsor cutting-edge research that allows companies to better retain women (Center for Work-Life Policy 2007). The taskforce’s central challenge: How do you spearhead a second generation of policy capable of keeping talented women on track for success? Focus sectors included legal; professional services; Fortune 500; and science, engineering, and technology.
Six core elements were identified:The remainder of this paper will briefly describe case studies that focus on one of the aforementioned core elements. Most case studies were taken from Hewlett (2007).
•
Establish flexible work arrangements;
•
Create career arc flexibility;
•
Reimagine work life;
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Help women sustain ambition;
•
Harness altruism; and
•
Reduce stigma and stereotypes.
Establish Flexible Work Arrangements
I am currently a work-at-home mother. . . .I have been very lucky to be able to continue to work for two different employers while working from home. It has been beneficial to both of us since they are in need of employees and I am able to schedule my hours as I need. . . .
Flexible work arrangements dominate women’s wish lists. Ernst and Young (accounting, audit, tax) has flexible work arrangements that allow schedules that can include compressed workweeks, flextime, reduced-hours, short-term seasonal arrangements, job sharing, and telecommuting. Customized work arrangements are negotiated individually between manager and employee. A firm-wide survey confirmed that two-thirds of the people using flexible work arrangements view them as a reason for staying or joining the firm. Flex employees are still serious contenders for promotion; 10 percent of all female Ernst and Young principals and partners work flexibly as well as 30 percent of those women one notch down the ladder. Women’s retention rates now mirror that of men at all levels, saving the company $10 million annually in costs associated with replacing employees.
U.K.-based BT, formerly British Telecommunications, pioneered the flexibility program Freedom to Work and helped craft legislation that culminated in the U.K.’s Employment Act of 2002. Three-quarters of BT employees now work flexibly, and over three-quarters of flex-employees are men. The company has seen employee turnover drop to 3 percent with 99 percent of BT moms returning to work after maternity leave (U.K. average is 47 percent). With a large population of employees working from home, BT saves million a year in reduced office space. Clearly this is a win–win situation.
Create Career Arc Flexibility
A few months [after my son was born] my husband and I started talking about me going back to work. I knew I didn’t need to go back right away, but I knew if I stayed out too long people would not be interested in me when I tried to go back. So I updated my resume and started looking for a part-time position. I had two hits on my resume from local companies . . .within a span of four months. The first company had never had a part-time engineer but thought they might be open to the idea. The second company had utilized part-time engineers pursuing advanced degrees in the past and was very open to the idea of hiring a part-time engineer . . .
Flexible work arrangements allow an employee to ratchet down, but they don’t address the need to temporarily drop out. Competent, driven women in high-impact jobs are often forced out of the work force when they need time out and have a hard time opting back in. Prospective employers are often wary of hiring individuals with gaps in their resume or in hiring an “overqualified” individual in spite of the fact that the less stressful position may be exactly what the prospective hire wants in order to on-ramp back into the workforce. A more sophisticated form of flexibility could minimize this. Arc-of-career flexibility takes into account women’s nonlinear, discontinuous work lives, allowing ambitious women the capability to on-ramp by doing high-level part-time work or different, but challenging, work until she is ready to ramp back up to full speed.
Booz Allen Hamilton (global technology consultants) realized that loosing a talented employee is like losing a product line. In management consulting, continuity of the client–consultant relationship underscores the importance of retention. Booz Allen’s adjunct program provides individuals who need to ramp down with part-time high-impact work as freelancers. An added benefit is that during upswings and downturns in the business cycle, adjunct workers can easily expand or contract capacity at the firm. At this time, adjunct workers receive a fee but no benefits, although the company is considering adding a package of benefits, including partial health coverage to the program.
Lehman Brothers, a financial services firm, invites women who have had at least five years of financial services experience who have been out of the work force for three years or less and had expressed an interest to return to their careers to an “encore event.” This recruitment tool was developed in response to Lehman’s severe retention problem—only 30 percent of newly hired women stayed with the firm past five years. After Lehman’s success, top-tier business schools such as Wharton, Harvard, and Dartmouth, are now starting programs such as Career Comeback that target high-powered stay-at-home moms who want to on-ramp.
Reimagine Work Life
When Hurricane Katrina hit the area in which I live, it impacted my life immensely. Although my home did not suffer damage, my parent’s home needed to be completely gutted and rebuilt. They are in their midseventies, and I was very concerned that seeing their home in such a state of disaster would impact their health or break their hearts. So for six weeks I put in twelve-hour days, intent on getting their devastated house to look instead like a clean construction site. As my office was also impacted and temporarily shut down, I automatically had some time away from my full-time engineering position. This was a wake-up call: What am I going to do if my aging parents need constant care and supervision in the future? How am I going to handle that, as well as my kids and job?
Most companies have benefits and family support programs that target married parents with children. But half of all professional women are childless, with nearly a third not currently married. Yet they all have parents and may still have serious caregiver responsibilities. A talented woman may not be “derailed” by a two-year-old at thirty-five, but she may be forced to off-ramp by an eighty-year-old when she is fifty (Hewlett 2007). The mommy track has now been joined by the daughter track. In fact, many minorities frequently take on the caregiving responsibilities of needy young and old people who are not biologically part of their immediate family. This is particularly true in the African American and Hispanic communities.
Several large global companies have anticipated the future by instituting new programs or expanding existing ones. Citigroup (financial services) has instated Elder Care Management Services, which enables employees, their siblings, and elderly relatives to consult with trained professionals about eldercare options for up to six free hours. Time Warner (media and entertainment) recently broadened its employee assistance program to include not only employee dependents but “reliant” individuals that include any person that a family supports either financially or emotionally. Time Warner’s scholarship program also allows a reliant individual to apply for company scholarships. Johnson and Johnson (health care and services) allows employee’s children or grandchildren to attend their highly rated daycare facilities.
Help Women Sustain Ambition
After a decade as a consulting engineer, I was ready to move up the ladder as an associate. However, this coincided with my wanting to start a family. Because I wanted more flexibility than I thought the promotion would afford me, I left for a position in academia. Although teaching and research do offer more flexibility, the hours are grueling, the engineering education community is even less diverse than industry, and the stress of being an untenured professor and mother of two small children nearly did me in. Now tenured and diaper-bag free, I relish my personal and professional life but wonder if it had to be so arduous and convoluted.
Data suggests that women are not as ambitious as their male peers and that the difference in ambition increases with age as a women moves through her twenties, thirties, and forties. Taking time off or working part time are choices that impact an individual’s work prospects, and this impact is hard to recover from. Many women are discouraged and eventually reduce what they expect from themselves career-wise. Their dreams and aspirations are downsized. At the same time there still exists the glass ceiling with its difficulties ranging from overt discrimination to lack of role models and networks. Possible solutions are an employer-sponsored women’s network and leadership training programs specifically targeting female executives.
With current estimates that 80 percent of graduate degrees will be going to women, Johnson and Johnson initiated the Women’s Leadership Initiative. The initiative unites women through common interests and activities across Johnson and Johnson companies. Activities include networking and mentoring events. In the last ten years, female vice-presidents have increased from 14 to 30 percent. General Electric (industrial products) created the Women’s Network. This program’s main initiative is recruiting talented women into technology and engineering. However, one of its greatest benefits is using the annual review process to pinpoint and promote leaders. Network leaders are identified through the annual review, with the idea that the leadership position will give high-potential women the experience required to rise in their careers. Despite its reputation as a bastion of white males, GE won the prestigious Catalyst Award in 2004 for its efforts to advance women.
Harness Altruism
I am interested in work the done by Engineers Without Borders or Engineers for a Sustainable Future, but it is hard to volunteer time [as a stay-at-home mom] because I would have to pay for childcare . . .
As indicated by the data in Table 2, the reasons women go to work are varied. It’s not just about the money—many women want to give back to society. Firms that create true outlets for altruism can better retain their talented female employees. These programs must be grounded in the company’s core belief system. When public service is embedded in a company’s culture, employees can safely wear their volunteer commitments as a badge of honor as opposed to hiding them for fear that the volunteer hours will be looked upon as negatively impacting an employee’s attention to the job.
Goldman Sachs (financial services) looks at public service as both a leadership development tool and a key way to retain top talent. Cisco goes one step farther: the Leadership Fellows Program allows employees the ability to work with a nonprofit for a year and return reenergized and with new skills. Each fellow is expected to accomplish something tangible while at the nonprofit. American Express employees that have worked for the company for ten years can apply for a six month paid sabbatical (complete with paid benefits) so that they can work for the nonprofit of their choice. An American Express employee, whose sabbatical allowed her to successfully revamp a nonprofit’s corporate giving fund, says, “It’s such a creative form of professional development.”
Reduce Stigma and Stereotypes
Raising children is an extremely difficult job, demanding exceptional hours and commitment. I am all for extending . . . every accommodation to reenter [the engineering workforce] after this vital task is accomplished.
Stigma often leads to marginalization in the workplace. In many companies, the unspoken yet negative perception toward nonstandard work arrangements can ultimately make it hard for an ambitious woman to choose to use a flexible work schedule. Instead she may possibly leave the firm for a position with reduced responsibilities. The company looses a seasoned employee and the woman just downsized her ambition.
Telecommuting, although theoretically on the books, is avoided because women do not want to tarnish their professional reputations. If you want to be on the A team, you have to play by A-team rules. With the impact of 9/11 still fresh and a potential bird flu epidemic looming, Lehman Brothers decided it was time for telecommuting to go mainstream. If a major catastrophe prevented employees from getting to the office, the company provided the technology so that they could work from home. An unintended consequence of the disaster planning was the concept that flexible schedules were now legitimate. Flexibly working is now part of disaster preparedness and thus gender-neutral.
The Future
The labor market is at the beginning of a baby bust. The baby boomers are retiring in great numbers and the labor force is not growing fast enough to keep up with future demand. In addition, women are graduating with more than 50 percent of college degrees worldwide. Any employer who understands these things knows how important it is to keep women working (Belkin 2007). The programs and policies outlined in this article, primarily taken from Hewlett (2007) can be modified and used by any size business that values its female employees.
References
Belkin, L. (2007). “Life’s work: After baby, boss comes calling.” New York Times, May 17, 2007.
Bennetts, L. (2007). The feminine mistake, Harper Collins, New York.
Center for Work-Life Policy. (2007). “The hidden brain drain task force: Women and minorities as unrealized assets.” http://www.worklifepolicy.org/documents/initiatives-taskforce.pdf (June 14, 2007).
Hewlett, S. A. (2007). Off-ramps and on-ramps, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
NBC Today. (2007). “Want to return to your career?” NBC Today, May 18, 2007, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18726931/ (June 14, 2007).
Steiner, L. M. (2007). “Back in business.” More, 10(5), 160–165.
Biographies
Norma Jean Mattei, Ph.D., P. E., is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of New Orleans, and can be contacted via e-mail at [email protected]. Lisa J. Jennings, M.A., A.M.ASCE, is staff liaison to ASCE’s Committee on Diversity and Women in Civil Engineering and to the Committee on Pre-College Outreach. She can be contacted via e-mail at [email protected].
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Published In
Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 8 • Issue 1 • January 2008
Pages: 27 - 31
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© 2008 ASCE.
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Published online: Jan 1, 2008
Published in print: Jan 2008
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