Off-Ramps and On-Ramps

7

Reimagining Work Life

Many of the standard work-life policies offered by companies were designed with a specific demographic in mind: married with children. For decades the best benefits—and finest family support programs—in large corporations have been devoted to this group of employees.

For more and more workers this narrow focus just doesn’t cut the mustard. As we saw in chapter 2, a large proportion (44 percent) of highly qualified women are childless.¹ Indeed, fully half of professional women ages twenty-eight to forty don’t have children.² Some will undoubtedly become older moms, but given the fact that 39 percent of forty-one- to fifty-five-year-old professional women in our survey don’t have children, we can assume that childlessness ...