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Continued from previous page
Getting Back in the Game
In March 2007, Wallace participated in Career Comeback: A UBS Fellowship Program for Professional Women Reentering
the Workforce, a three-day Wharton
Executive Education program designed
to facilitate women’s returns
to workplace after multi-year breaks.
Sponsored by global financial services
firm UBS, the program grew out
of “Back in the Game: Returning to
Business after a Hiatus: Experiences
and Recommendations for Women,
Employers, and Universities,” an influential
study led by Wharton
adjunct associate professor of management
Monica McGrath.
Conducting the research with support
from the Wharton Center for
Leadership and Change Management
and the Forté Foundation, a nonprofit
group that promotes women’s leadership, McGrath enlisted as co-authors two alumnae of the
Wharton MBA Program for Executives, Mary Gross, WG’02,
then head of learning and development with Merrill Lynch
Investment Managers, and Marla Driscoll, WG’01, an independent
consultant who was previously a partner at Accenture.
In late 2004 and early 2005, the researchers surveyed 130
executives who had stepped out of the workforce for at least
two years and had already returned, or were trying to do so.
Of those who responded, 81% had an MBA. Sixty percent
had left their jobs within the last five years and 18% within
the last 10 years. At the time of the survey, 60% of the
respondents had reentered the workforce and 32% were actively
seeking employment.
The study revealed that 43% of the women surveyed
stayed out of the workforce longer than they expected, and
87% of those who initially never planned to return to work
changed their minds, whether due to economic pressures or
a reawakened desire for professional challenge. Many reentered
by joining smaller companies or by shifting industries
or functional roles.
McGrath and her co-authors found that the women often
faced a difficult transition.
“Female executives who leave the corporate world when
they hit a glass ceiling, want to raise a family full time, or decide
to focus on other interests encounter frustrating roadblocks
in their attempts to reenter the workforce,” says
McGrath, who is academic director for the Career Comeback program and also served as the former director of leadership
development for the Wharton MBA program. “To overcome
these obstacles, women must update their skills and stay on
top of general business trends.”
For those who take the off-ramp from a high-powered
career, the on-ramps can be difficult to find. When they
were asked to describe their hunt for a job after deciding
to return to work, 50% of the survey respondents said they
were frustrated and 18% said the experience was depressing.
The women were “angry about having to justify the time
they took off and start over as if they had never gotten an
MBA,” says McGrath.
A Successful Reentry
According to the research, to overcome the obstacles, women
should confront the difficulties they face and prepare for
their return to the labor force before they even leave.
Kelly Breslin Wright, WG’98, could serve as a textbook
case of smooth exit and reentry to the workplace. While she
didn’t plan every aspect of her hiatus, she kept her network
active and made adjustments required along the way to secure
the flexibility she needed to meet her family responsibilities.
Prior to starting a family, Wright left the long hours
of management consulting to return to her pre-MBA career
of sales. She rose to become Vice President of Client Services
at San Francisco’s AtHoc Software before taking a six-month
maternity leave following the birth of her first son.
“I thought I would go back to AtHoc, but I wasn’t sure,”
she says, calling in from her car while dropping her children
off at summer camp. “I didn’t know how I would maintain
the balance in my career. I made the decision to come back
in a different role.”
Instead of returning as VP of Client Services, she returned
to an individual-contributor sales role at a 60% schedule. She
found that she could maintain balance and excel in her work
without the additional demands of managing direct reports,
and she soon returned to full-time hours.
Her work/life mix changed when her second son was
born. The family addition coincided with a temporary relocation
to Los Angeles that led to an extended leave of absence
from AtHoc. When she returned to San Francisco, she continued
to stay at home to care for her children to keep a close
eye when they faced some health issues. By the time she was
ready to reenter the workplace, she had been gone nearly two
years — far longer than she had planned — and she had concerns
about returning to a full-time schedule.
That’s where her connections from her previous job, from
Wharton, and from Stanford, where she earned her undergraduate
degree, came in.
She began talking to Tableau Software, a data visualization
startup that had been founded as a research project at
Stanford and had hired friends of hers among its earliest employees.
The company was looking for a vice president of
sales to relocate to its headquarters in Seattle.
“I didn’t want to relocate, I didn’t want direct reports, and
I didn’t want to work at 100% capacity,” she says. “But I had
a track record in sales. People already knew me and had an
expectation of what my level of performance would be.”
She began working an 80% schedule from her home office
as Tableau’s first salesperson. The fit worked extremely
well, and Wright found that she had enough flexibility in her
hours to ramp up to full time. Today Tableau has added to its
San Francisco staff and opened a satellite office.
Now her children, including stepdaughter MaryKate, and
sons Jacob and Ryan, are in school, and Wright says they maintain
a balance. “If I worked somewhere that didn’t allow me to
leave to volunteer in the classroom or take them to swim lessons,
I would quit. There is no question that for me family is
my number-one priority. Work is important, but it’s second.”
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