FOREWORD
June 2006 was a watershed moment—and for me quite magical. On the nineteenth and twentieth of that month, “change agent” teams from the thirty-four global companies that constitute the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force assembled in New York for our first annual Hidden Brain Drain Summit—to drive action on the ground. Two and a half years after its formation, the task force was ready to share cutting-edge research and spearhead a second generation of policy and practice designed to keep talented women on the road to success.
The summit succeeded beyond our wildest dreams—accelerating change, spurring new action. The reaction of Rachel Lee (vice president of human resources at American Express) was typical. In her words: “This summit provided true, leading-edge thinking—a rarity today. It has given me ideas, data, stories, a new language, a valuable network—and a boost of energy and confidence to deliver something richer for women.”1
Lee’s enthusiasm is already bearing fruit. As the lead on an initiative called Embrace, she and her team have created an “internal consulting pool” for the OPEN small business division at American Express, which offers high-performing individuals—men and women—a way to scale back their working hours in order to attend to child care, elder care, or other personal priorities. If you are accepted into the pool, all kinds of flexibility can become possible—a four-day week, a ten-month year, or work hours arranged around school schedules. Through this program the company is committing to “chunking out” high-value work in different ways to accommodate part-time project work that can be undertaken from home. Participants must work a minimum of twenty-one hours a week—to ensure that they can retain benefits—and the arrangement must be for a minimum of six months. Lee thinks there will be a “sweet spot” of two to three years.
Amex hopes to keep the pool fresh—the concept is for people to rotate in and out. The company sees this program as being highly selective, attracting high-caliber talent both from within Amex (primarily from OPEN) and outside (former employees looking to return, individuals from other companies looking for an on-ramp).
When asked why this initiative is being launched at OPEN, Lee explained, “It’s a burning issue for this division—and a microcosm of the challenges elsewhere. OPEN is a fast-growing business with aggressive growth plans. This creates huge pressure to do a better job attracting and retaining top talent. The majority of OPEN’s employees are women, and what’s more, many are in the child-bearing years—a trigger zone for offramping decisions. Right now many women do not return from maternity leave because they feel they cannot achieve the balance they want in their lives. The internal consulting pool is meant to change that in short order.”2
But let’s back up. Why is there this need for a second generation of policy? Why is it that after decades of creating opportunities for women and proactively nurturing diversity, companies are still struggling with the challenge of retaining and advancing women? An editorial in the Wall Street Journal reminded us that “at big established companies, women in recent years have made little progress breaking into senior ranks.”3 The fact is, the first generation of policies and practice took us only partway there. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the challenge was thought to be about providing equal access—and then allowing enough time to go by so that the pipeline could fill. The reasoning was simple: if you eliminated barriers and created a truly level playing field so that men and women competed on equal terms, then, over time, as successive cohorts of wellqualified female professionals filled the pipeline, women would eventually be fairly represented in top jobs. This has not happened.
At the nub of the problem is the fact that women are not male clones, they are not merely “men in skirts,” to use Shirley Conran’s inimitable language. A large percentage of highly qualified professional women have different needs and wants and find it extremely difficult to replicate the white male competitive model. They tend to have serious responsibilities on the home front (to children, to elderly parents), and they have somewhat different professional aspirations. Their ambitions are constructed and fueled in multidimensional ways. Women seek meaning and connection in their work lives and are less focused on money and power than their male peers.
We therefore need a second round of policy that moves beyond access and opportunity and creates alternative pathways to power and alternative work models better suited to the talents, ambitions, and life rhythms of women. We need to develop work environments where women can both take charge and take care. That’s where the task force comes in.
In February 2004, Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Center for Work-Life Policy and Columbia University), Cornel West (Princeton University), and I founded the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force. The idea was to persuade progressive corporations to become stakeholders in an effort to fully realize female talent over the life span of their careers. The mission of the task force is to identify, develop, and promote a second generation of corporate policies and practices that support women’s ambition, work, and life needs.
It’s hard to believe that the task force was founded less than three years ago. Since then, we’ve grown and prospered. We started with just six companies—a small band of true believers. The task force now comprises thirty-four global corporations, representing 2.5 million employees, operating in 152 countries around the world, and is led by co-chairs from an impressive roster of companies—Booz Allen Hamilton, Ernst & Young, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Lehman Brothers, and Time Warner—who help shape the arc of our research and spearhead action on the ground. Task force member companies have a market capitalization of $3 trillion and are a force to be reckoned with. Together, we have the capability of messing with the model and we’re beginning to do so. All eighteen examples of innovative best practices featured in part II of this book are taken from task force companies, many of them a validation and/or direct result of the research we have done together. As a group, we have created rich data sets and developed powerful new language around policies and practices that better accommodate women’s nonlinear careers.
A word on the beneficiaries of this second generation of policy. Over the last two and a half years, the task force—understanding the need to have a global perspective—has established a tradition of launching its research studies in London as well as in New York. At a 2005 research launch held at the House of Commons in London, various private-sector leaders spoke about the European baby bust and the urgent need to restructure work so that older workers can stay in their jobs longer—to fill out the talent pool and to lighten the pension burden. At this event, Patricia Fili-Krushel, executive vice president of administration at Time Warner, task force co-chair, and the closing speaker, came up with a powerful image that has since loomed large in task force conversations: “These women who leave or languish, are, in effect, the canaries in the coal mine, the first and most conspicuous casualties of an out-dated, dysfunctional career model.” Fili-Krushel then went on to enumerate some of the other casualties: “58-year-old baby boomers who don’t want to retire but are no longer willing to put in 70-hour weeks; and 28-year-old Gen X and Y men who want to be better, more involved fathers than their dads were, and need flexible work.”4
In short, there is a whole queue of people—important constituencies all—who also want to mess with the male competitive model. Thirty-two and thirty-seven-year-old working mothers are merely the early warning system, telling of impending shortages and losses and heralding a potential disaster we’ve still got time to prevent. But only if we pay attention to it now.
—Carolyn Buck Luce
Chair, Hidden Brain Drain Task Force
New York City, September 2006