Women pay for career interruptions

NEW YORK — Professional women who put careers on hold for family or other reasons earn 18 percent less once they return to the workforce, a new survey reports.

The salary penalty for hopping off the career track is even higher in the business world, where earnings drop an average of 28 percent, according to the survey by the New York-based Center for Work-Life Policy.

The drop in pay partly reflects many women’s decisions to return to work in jobs with less responsibility, or to part-time jobs. But it may also reflect that women are exiting the workforce during the years when many men make the largest leaps up the corporate ladder, the survey’s authors conclude.

The price for exiting work steepens the longer women wait before returning. Women who take less than a year off from their careers return to the labor force at an average of 11 percent less pay. But those who take off for three years or more return to pay averaging 37 percent less than what they originally earned, according to the survey.

The research is detailed in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review. The survey tapped more than 2,400 women nationwide, focusing on those with a graduate degree, professional degree or undergraduate degree with high honors. The group also surveyed 653 similarly qualified men as a means of drawing comparisons.

The notion that more executive women are choosing to exit the workforce has generated considerable attention over the past year in business circles. The survey, done this past summer, is one of the first efforts to try to verify and explain women’s choices.

Women surveyed who had temporarily left the workforce said they did so for an average of 2.2 years — just 1.2 years for those working in business.