With her bestselling books and illuminating studies in The Harvard Business Review, Sylvia Ann Hewlett is charting new ground for companies and employees.

An economist with two decades of thought leadership on issues of gender and workforce development, she is founder and President of the Center for Work-Life Policy (CWLP), a non-profit think tank that helps businesses design and implement policies that increase the productivity and personal/familial well-being of employees.

“It’s a win-win situation,” says Hewlett. “Workplace policies that address the work-life challenge benefit the lives of working parents and their children. Simultaneously, these policies enhance workplace retention and productivity and improve the bottom line.”
 
Dr. Hewlett is co-director of the Center’s “Hidden Brain Drain Task Force,” a consortium of 34 global corporations committed to identifying employee-related obstacles and opportunities. Her clear analysis of complex labor trends attitudes allow businesses to better retain and more fully tap into the talent at the heart of economic success and competitive advantage.

Her reports on such phenomena as highly qualified women dropping out of mainstream careers (“Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success”) and the hidden bias keeping multi-racial and multi-cultural employees out of the executive suite (“Leadership in Your Midst: Tapping the Hidden Strength of Minority Executives”) appear regularly in The Harvard Business Review (HBR) and on the front pages of The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Hewlett believes that the facts and figures she presents can be a catalyst for change. To promote best practices, she offers case studies of companies that are successfully meeting various work-life challenges.

In the new study, “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-hour workweek” (HBR 2006), Hewlett paints a nuanced portrait of the all-consuming career — rewarding in many ways, but not without danger to individuals, families and companies.

Hewlett is director of the Gender and Public Policy Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In 1993, she founded the National Parenting Association to help foster a society that recognizes the needs of working parents and their children.
 

The event was very good. All the feedback I received about her discussion was excellent. She was also very generous with her time, as people stood in line to speak with her personally after the event.

Association for Corporate Growth

Her bestselling book, Creating a Life was the subject of TIME and People cover stories and was named one of the best books of the year by BusinessWeek. Her other five books include The War Against Parents (co-authored with Cornel West) and When the Bough Breaks, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize.

Hewlett’s latest book is On-Ramps, Off-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success (Harvard Business School Press, May 2007.)

She has been featured on 60 Minutes, Oprah, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, and in The Economist and The New York Times.

A Kennedy Scholar (Harvard) and graduate of Cambridge University, Hewlett earned her Ph.d. in Economics at London University.