A few weeks ago, in response to the musings of Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, on women and science, I wrote about the need to reimagine the workplace. Women are in fact different from men, I said, not in their abilities, but in the timing, and breadth, of their parental responsibilities. Careers, therefore, should allow for stopping and starting, leaving and re-entering.

Some companies are experimenting with such programs. Several of them ? Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Ernst & Young ? sponsored a newly released study that was commissioned by the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a research organisation, and conducted by Harris Associates.

The companies that formed the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force were interested in this topic because too many of their trained and educated women were leaving. “We were clearly losing far more women than men at the five- to eight-year” employment mark, says Paul Bader, a managing partner at Ernst & Young.

The task force study shows they are not alone. Among “highly qualified women” ? those with a graduate degree, a professional degree or a high-honours undergraduate degree ? nearly 40 per cent have left the work force voluntarily (meaning they were not dismissed or caught in a downsizing), compared with 24 per cent of men. Among women with children, the proportion rises to 43 per cent. And 58 per cent of top-tier women describe their careers as “non-linear”.

“These data tell us that if companies are going to have a lifelong relationship with women, there are going to be ebbs and flows,” says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder and president of the Center for Work-Life Policy. “Employers can no longer pretend that treating women as ‘men in skirts’ will fix their retention problems.”

But where to start? For ideas, the task force turned to many of its member companies, the ones already testing new ways of working. Booz Allen Hamilton is one example. Corporate consulting loses women at a particularly high rate ? they are twice as likely as men to leave as they reach the centre rungs of the consulting career ladder.

Aprimary reason, says DeAnne Aguirre, a senior vice-president and managing partner for global organisation and change leadership practice, is the expectation of frequent travel and the “road warrior mentality” that accompanies it.

In the last few years, Booz Allen has adopted a “ramp up, ramp down” approach to projects, effectively unbundling the components of a project and dividing them up so that employees ? particularly women ? can choose a piece of the work that might not require travel or that might allow them to work from home.

“We can carve out pieces of work for the last months of pregnancy,” when a woman cannot travel, Aguirre explains by way of example. “Not all work needs to be done at a client site.”

In most companies, such flexibility has a price: working just one piece of a project, logging shorter hours or taking several years off irrevocably dents a career. A few companies are addressing that de facto penalty. Ernst & Young has created a Career Watch programme that tries to ensure that the top-performing women are assigned on the basis of their talents, not their work schedule. Reduced workweeks, Bader explains, should mean less pay and a smaller workload, but not less interesting work.

The task force looked not only at programmes that would encourage women to stay, but also at ones aimed at women who leave. One startling finding of the survey was that only five per cent of women were interested in returning to the company they left once they went back to work ? and in the business sector the percentage was zero.

Booz Allen has started to address that problem by seeking out women employees who leave, particularly those who leave to spend time with their families. The company offers these women contract work, so they can keep their skills polished, and the firm makes it clear they are welcome to return.

It is too soon to tell what the programme’s payoff will be, Aguirre says. Nonetheless, she said, “Not only is it good for the bottomline, but it’s the right thing to do.”

?NYTNS