During tough economic times it’s more vital than ever to hold onto your top performers: They’ve got the outsize smarts and dedication your firm needs to survive recession and emerge stronger. Yet in 2009 many employers are failing to support and sustain their best people. Loyalty and trust are out the window. Engagement is through the floor. Flight risk is at an all time high.

Right now, a battle for survival has eclipsed the war for talent. Business leaders are slashing headcounts and budgets, and focusing with laser vision on what it takes to succeed in a deep global recession. But when the economy recovers, companies will return swiftly to the crucial work of recruiting and retaining top performers. Renewal and growth cannot be rekindled without high-octane brain power.

Yet the value proposition is changing dramatically in a new era of talent management. Two dominant demographic cohorts—Gen Y and Baby Boomers—are redefining what it takes for a company to be an "employer of choice." The 78 million Boomers and 70 million Gen Ys crave flexibility, personal growth, connection, and opportunities to "give back." The Bookend Generations are remapping old ideals of success as they pursue a "Rewards Remix" that prizes meaning and choice over money.

Women play a key role in the technology platform that drives international finance. They are outstanding communicators and crack problem-solvers whose core ability to create synergies between finance and technology is enormously important in these highly collaborative work environments. Women in tech love their jobs and feel rewarded for their efforts, yet all too often their career ambitions become stalled. They identify three on-going challenges as a set of problem areas: opaque career paths, a 24/7 workplace culture, and a dearth of mentors and sponsors. Coming through with additional support on these fronts could make all the difference, enabling women in tech on Wall Street to build on their impressive strengths and assets.

Leaders in the financial sector increasingly recognize that they can’t afford a female brain drain in technology as world economies go through wrenching changes. As showcased in this study, a number of cutting-edge Wall Street firms are developing an exciting array of initiatives to advance promising women technologists whose talents can help fuel a new era of recovery in the world’s capital markets.

Viewed from Wall Street the current credit crunch and market downturn is exceptionally difficult to deal with. The cascading losses, the scale of the layoffs (100,000 and counting) and the fear that generous profit margins are a thing of the past—that new restrictions on leverage and risk will limit profitability going forward—make this the toughest down cycle in a generation.

So how is top talent dealing with this onslaught? In a word--badly. In focus groups conducted for this study, senior executives talked about being angry, anxious and deeply stressed. Troubled firms are finding that precisely the wrong people (top performers with other job options) are heading for the door.

Forty-one percent of highly qualified scientists, engineers, and technologists on the lower rungs of corporate career ladders are female. But more than half (52%) drop out. Why? To better understand the scope and shape of female talent, the Athena Factor research project studied the career trajectories of women with SET credentials in the private sector.

This study showcases the strengths of Latina executives. Drawing upon a heritage that is rich in transferable skill sets – work ethic, collaborative leadership, cultural fluency – Latinas have extraordinary potential in the executive suite.

Potential is the key word here. The fact is, many of the rich assets Latinas bring to the workplace are either ignored or denied by employers. Negative stereotypes are alive and well – impeding progress, undermining trust and increasing “flight risk” among Latinas.

(CWLP October 2007) 

With talent shortages looming over the next decade, what can companies do to attract and retain the large number of professional women who are forced off the career highway? By documenting the successful efforts of a group of cutting-edge global companies to retain talented women and reintegrate them if they've already left, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps answers this critical question. Working closely with companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, General Electric, and others, author Sylvia Ann Hewlett identifies what works and why. Based on firsthand experience with these companies, along with extensive data that provides the most comprehensive and nuanced portrait of women's career paths, this book documents the actions forward-thinking companies must take to reverse the female brain drain and ensure their access to talent over the long term.

(Source: Harvard Business School Press, 2007)

Across the economy, there are high-earning professionals whose work has become all consuming. Do these professionals constitute a new breed? Not entirely. Highly demanding and important jobs have always been around - along with the workaholics who created them where they didn't need to exist. Yet there is a difference. No longer the pitiable drones and graspers of society, today's overachieving professionals are recast as road warriors and masters of the universe. What emerges from the two large surveys conducted by Hewlett's Center for Work-Life Policy is a complex picture of the all-consuming career - rewarding in many ways, but not without danger to individuals and society. (December 2006)

(Source: Harvard Business Review)

Minority professionals often hold leadership roles outside work, serving as pillars of their communities and churches and doing more than their share of mentoring. It's time their employers took notice of these invisible lives and saw them as sources of strength. This new research underscores that the lives of minority professionals are rich with experience that goes unleveraged by their employers. It also highlights a startling fact: These lives remain invisible largely by choice. For many reasons, minority professionals are reluctant to speak of their outside pursuits and accomplishments to colleagues and managers. We are left with a dual challenge: Companies can't leverage what they don't see -- and they can't see what is purposely concealed. Case studies reveal innovative solution sets. (November 2005)

(Source: Harvard Business Review)

For professional women, it's hard not to step off the career fast track at some point along the way. With children to raise, elderly parents to care for, and all manner of other pulls on their time, they are confronted with one "off-ramp" after another. The "on ramps" for professional women to get back on track are few and far between. New survey research (unveiled for the first time in this article) reveals the extent of the problem - what percentage of highly qualified women leave work and for how long, what obstacles they face coming back, and what price they pay for their time out. Case examples reveal some promising solutions. (March 2005)

(Harvard Business Review)

When it comes to having a high-powered career and a family, the painful truth is that women in the United States don't "have it all." In general, Hewlett's data show that, for too many women, the demands of ambitious careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and the difficulties of conceiving later in life undermine the possibility of combining high-level work with family. Hewlett urges lawmakers and corporations to establish policies that support working parents. But recognizing that changes won't happen overnight, she exhorts young women to be more deliberate about their career and family choices.

(Source: Harvard Business Review, April 2002)

With compelling portraits of women's lives and a wealth of new data, Hewlett's powerful and moving book tackles one of the most significant challenges for women today creating rich multidimensional lives that contain both career and children. It details the difficulties of professional women who find it challenging to combine high-flying careers with motherhood. The book was named one of the ten best of 2002 by Business Week.

(Source: Miramax Books, 2002; Paperback with new preface, 2004)

In Creating A Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, Sylvia Ann Hewlett tackles one of the most wrenching challenges for women today -- creating rich multidimensional lives that contain both career and children. Hewlett brings to the book her substantial expertise as a policy analyst and her own difficult experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. Combining poignant and compelling portraits of women's lives with a groundbreaking survey commissioned specifically for this book, she gives voice to women's hopes and anguish and unearths stunning new information. The voices Hewlett captures are searingly honest, but these facts and these stories can both liberate and empower young women.

(from: inside flap, Talk Miramax, 2002)

In The War Against Parents, co-authors Hewlett and Cornel West show how for 30 years big business, government and the wider culture have waged a silent war against parents. Moms and dads have been hurt by managerial greed, pounded by tax and housing policy, and invaded and degraded by the media. As a result, children have been left home alone to raise themselves on a thin and cruel diet of junk food, gagster rap, and trash talk shows. In calling for a Parents' Bill of Rights, the authors seek to unite America's 62 million parents behind an agenda that spands the divides of race, gender and class.

(from: inside flap, Houghton Mifflin, 2002)

With poignant true stories and a wealth of statistics, Hewlett demonstrates in shocking detail exactly how the United States has fallen so far behind other countries in its commitment to children, and how it is possible that a baby born in the shadow of the White House is now more likely to die in the first year of life than a baby born in Jamaica or Singapore. When the Bough Breaks doesn't just identify the problems, though; it outlines a multifaceted action plan encompassing parenting leave and child-care policy, tax reform, family-friendly workplaces, volunteer efforts, and more. This ground-breaking, thoughtful analysis proves once and for all that an investment in America's children will guarantee a future for all of us.

(from: back cover, HarperPerennial, 1992)

With irrefutable statistics, case histories, and the story of her own struggle to both work and have children, Hewlett shows how American women have been stripped on their traditional social supports of the past and thrust into the harsh economic realities of the present. In A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America, Hewlett shows us what we can do, and must do about it.

(from: back cover, Warner Books, 1967)