The findings were announced at The New York Times auditorium with presentations by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, one of the authors of the study and Founder and President of The Center for Work Life Policy, and Lisa Belkin, the author of the New York Times Magazine cover story "The Opt-Out Revolution" which caused a media firestorm about time-outs from careers ("off-ramping") in 2003 and inspired the Center's first study of the trend in 2005. Since the recession, the study found, timeouts or "off-ramping" from a career for childcare or other reasons have become increasingly unaffordable to women whose income has become increasingly important to family budgets. Getting back into the workforce after a timeout has become even more difficult. 73% percent of women trying to return to the workforce after a voluntary timeout for childcare or other reasons have trouble finding a job. Those who do return lose 16 percent of their earning power and over a quarter report a decrease in their management responsibilities and 22 percent had to step down to a lower job title. And many women can't sustain the increased hours at most jobs today when saddled with an uneven share of family childcare and household responsibilities. Unless companies facilitate off-ramping and on-ramping more effectively, women's earning power and promotion opportunities will never measure up to the linear, lock-step progression of male careers. And over the long term, companies will lose out on the valuable contributions of women, who represent 58% of the highly credentialed talent pool. "As women experience difficulty getting back on the career track, confidence and ambition stall, and many women end up downsizing their dreams," says Hewlett. "Five years after the original study, this research continues to have profound implications: off-ramps and on-ramps are here to stay and employers should sit up and pay attention or suffer the consequences of sidelining and side-swiping 58 percent of the highly credentialed talent pool."

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and the founder and CEO of the Center for Talent Innovation, a nonprofit think tank. She founded and chairs the Task Force for Talent Innovation, 80 global companies focused on fully realizing the new streams of talent in the global marketplace. For nine years she directed the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and is ranked #16 on the "Thinkers 50" listing of the world's top business gurus. She is the author of 11 Harvard Business Review articles and ten critically acclaimed nonfiction books including Off-Ramps and On-Ramps; Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets; and in 2013, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor (Harvard Business Review Press). Her writings have appeared in The New York Times and Financial Times, and she is a featured blogger on HBR.org. She is a frequent guest on television, appearing on Oprah, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, the Today show and CNN Headline News. Hewlett has taught at Cambridge, Columbia, and Princeton universities. A Kennedy Scholar and graduate of Cambridge University, she earned her PhD in economics at London University.