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| Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success By Sylvia Ann HewlettHarvard Business School Press289
pp., $29.95 |
Hang on to those talented women!
In 'Off-Ramps and On-Ramps,' Sylvia Ann Hewlett urges companies to go the extra mile for women workers
from the July 31, 2007 edition
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•The future talent pool of highly skilled workers in many fields will be disproportionately female: Women earn 59 percent of US bachelor degrees and 60 percent of master's degrees, though they lag in doctoral programs.
•As the "chief instigators" behind 83 percent of all consumer decisions, women make invaluable members of product development and marketing teams.
•Sixty percent of highly qualified women have nonlinear careers, and 37 percent of them leave their careers – only for an average of 2.2 years – but they often have difficulty ramping back up.
•The cost of hiring a replacement for a woman who off-ramps averages 150 percent of her annual salary, and can run as high as 300 percent. So in many cases, it pays to be flexible during those average 2.2 years and keep her on the payroll.
The second half of Hewlett's book focuses on specific solutions business leaders can implement to retain highly qualified women (everything from seasonal flexibility to networking and mentoring to finding ways to gratify women's desires to give back to society), peppering the chapters with at-a-glance boxes that highlight company success stories.
While some are unpersuasive, other case studies, like those of the British communications firm the BT Group, are certainly impressive. Since introducing a radical approach to flexibility, the firm has seen its labor turnover drop to 3 percent. Ninety-nine percent of women return after maternity leave, compared to the national average of 47 percent – a statistic that saves the company £5 million ($10 million) a year. The company was so successful, in fact, that it provided a model for Britain's employment act of 2002, Hewlett says.
It's also part of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, an initiative launched several years ago by Hewlett's Center for Work-Life Policy in New York. The task force – which has attracted other large corporations such as American Express, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Microsoft, and Time Warner – has developed many of the strategies and produced many of the case studies Hewlett cites in her book.
More information and networking resources are available at worklifepolicy.org. Click on it some Friday night over PB&J.
• Christa Case is an editor in the Monitor's international news department.
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