Career Track or Mommy Track: How Do Women Decide?

When ambitious working professionals take time off from their jobs to focus on home and family they often sacrifice career opportunities. For those organizational leaders tasked with attracting and retaining top talent, having a better understanding of what factors women consider before deciding to leave the workforce would be helpful, particularly now as companies are making significant investments in interventions to keep high-potential female employees on board. Fortunately, new research by Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer (Harvard University) sheds light on how working women make the decision to leave the workforce to focus on the home front. Overall, Shafer found that husbands' careers affect wives' decisions to exit the labor force in some interesting ways. For example, she found that wives tend to consider what percentage of total household income would be lost if they left their job. Moreover, Shafer found that husbands' work hours had a strong influence on whether wives left the work force.