The Facts and Figures for Women Onrampers
The Center for Work-Life Policy/Harvard Business Review created a report that looked into the whys and what happens in the world of off and onramping for women. The results they found were discouraging to women who want to offramp and maintain their earning potential. The report did find that there is a substantial amount of women who onramp after taking time off, mostly for family issues.
An overwhelming amount of women offrampers want to return as an onramper (93%). This however, doesn’t happen as easily as they would hope. Due to the extremely structured policies and practices of most companies, flexible work hours and working mom focused procedures are not common. Because of this, only 74% of those aforementioned female onrampers succeed in rejoining the workforce.
The following stats are taken directly from the report and are based on answers from 2,443 women and 653 men.
- 37% of highly qualified women offramp (voluntarily leave their jobs for a period of time)
- On average, most women offramp for 2.2 years (1.2-1.5 in finance/banking careers) and when trying to return to work as an onramper, lose 18% of their earning power.
- For finance/banking careers, the earning power decreases to 28%
- This figure rises to 37% when the time off reaches 3 years
- 93% of women want to onramp, yet only 74% succeed and only 40% go back to their old jobs
- Only 5% of onrampers want to return to the jobs they previously had.
- Most onramping women (89%) want access to reduced hour jobs
- 1 in 4 women offramp to pursue a degree or training whereas 44% leave for family reasons
- Only 15% of women said “a powerful position” was an important career goal
- Ability to associate with people they respect weighed in as having an 82% importance, the freedom to “be themselves” came in at 79%, and the opportunity to be flexible with schedules was 64%
Source: WorkLifePolicy.org
