Book Review: Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping talented women on the road to success | Managing Leadership

This worthwhile book, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, is a well-organized and disciplined examination of the unique ways women pursue their careers over an adult life-span. The basic premise is that, as the title implies, women often need to turn off the fast-track for various compelling and inescapable reasons. After addressing these, many of them then want to merge back in. This book explains the phenomena behind this pattern, the business reasons why ways must be found to make it work, and various current efforts to do so.

The first part offers detailed and persuasive explanations of the numerous reasons women follow a different path through their careers than men. (Note that these are varied and complex; do not assume you know what they all are!) It then explains the demographic, labor, and educational trends that argue forcefully for finding ways to keep female managerial talent effectively employed throughout the uniquely feminine career pattern.

Part Two then offers several examples of programs that seem to be successful first steps toward doing this. These are eminently worth knowing about. However, they are elaborated using a lot of anecdotal “narratives” and statistical rehashes of evidence provided previously, creating an unsatisfying “page-filler” effect. You might want to scan this section, or just the box summaries at the end of each example, then look more closely at the ideas that interest you. I recommend that you include the discussions of women’s networks in this group.

The real value, alone worth the price of the book, is in the argumentation of the first part. Serious managers in all fields of endeavor will benefit from an attentive reading of it.

I do want to take a moment, here, to discuss an item or two that you may wish to be prepared for in your reading of this book.

The research appears to be well-organized and, in particular, effectively illuminating. I believe that it is generally legitimately so. But some peculiar anti-male biases - almost like echoes from an earlier, irrelevant, and largely bypassed era of radical feminism - mar the dialogue here and there. This tends to introduce a concern about the objectivity of the research and conclusions drawn from it - especially a seemingly heavy use of focus groups, a technique that, while of real value, is subject to the potential for undue influence by facilitators or outspoken members, lending a sense of force or unanimity that may not actually exist about the views reported.

An example of my concerns is a most unfortunate and ideologically partisan reference to the infamous Larry Summers speech that led to his expulsion as president of Harvard University. This is followed by peculiarly irrelevant references to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The first, to Clinton, is an oddly out-of-place and superficially neutral remark about his age and membership of the Baby Boomer generation. The second is an unmistakably snide insinuation that “a George W. America” proved to be an oppressively hostile environment partially at fault for a drop in sales of the author’s previous books.

I am confident that any conclusions you are tempted to draw about my own political inclinations from my comments above will be wrong. Moreover, the author of this otherwise fine book is welcome to her own politics and to ascribing her misfortunes to whomever she wishes. But what are these odd remarks doing in this book? And, what do they contribute to the development of its thesis?

My fear is that they undermine the reader’s confidence in it. They certainly did mine. After all, if she can’t resist keeping her politics out of the narrative of the book, how sure can we be that she kept it out of the underlying research and analysis? Surely the issue of how to keep women productively engaged in management careers is not a partisan political one.

Another regrettable theme in this otherwise excellent book is an unfortunate and overworked depiction of men as generally more mercenary about work than women, and women as generally more altruistic about it than men. This is a false and shallow attribution of base motives to men from their identification of power and money as motivations for advancing their careers. It is combined with a superfluous assignment of more “pure” motives to women for wanting to excel at work, such as a supposedly greater desire for meaningful collaboration and altruistic contribution.

My own experience directly conflicts with this assessment. Men may keep score differently, but they want to make a positive difference in the world and in people’s lives. Women, for their part, cannot be accused of failing to possess a robust appreciation of the value and application of power. The equations are far more difficult to work out than depicted here, and likely more similar than presented. More importantly, the contribution of this particular argument to the main theme of the book, especially the strained connection to the weak examples in the correlative chapter in Part Two, is probably a net negative.

Nevertheless, with these matters in mind as I read, I want to emphasize that I still found that her arguments in Part One are compelling and important contributions in their own right. In fact, the conclusions she presents in this section are hard to deny even if only from a purely logical standpoint. Moreover, while I find the items mentioned above unnecessary and peculiar, I also found the amount and focus of the research to be a substantial, positive step that can only lead to greater understanding of this issue; more of it, by more researchers, is needed.

The author’s argument is intelligently elaborated with good illustrations and stories of challenges faced by women in the typical work model (which, of course, does in fact happen to be male-oriented, though not as conspiratorially so as the author periodically implies). In particular, Chapter 4 provides a really excellent development of the demographic trends forcing businesses to adapt to the unique needs of women at work. Chapter 7 offers a similarly enlightening discussion of what these are.

With respect to this sort of argumentation, however, what I really missed was a presentation of the particular skills and thinking that women bring to the practice of management, distinct from those contributed by men. From my reading of this book, I gather that any such discussion remains fraught with risk; ask Larry Summers. But that risk is vastly exceeded by the danger of not having this discussion.

In the meanwhile, do read this fine book. Whoever you are, whatever industry you are in, wherever in the world you work, you will learn much of value to your organization generally, and to your own managerial skills particularly.

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