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How many are we? More than you might think. When we start the difficult process of relaunching, many of us feel quite isolated. But as more and more women attempt to relaunch, the number of services catering to this force is growing too. Case in point, iRelaunch.com founded by Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin. The co-authors of Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work, are themselves successful relaunchers. Cohen and Rabin conduct relaunching conferences around the country, and they offer coaching circles, online training classes, and webinars. They saw a need and are filling it. Cohen and Rabin say they’ve “run into a veritable army of relaunchers.”
The number, understandably, is constantly in flux as women move in and out of the workforce. But Cohen and Rabin have attempted to pin the number down.
Starting with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey, in 2005, an average of 9.1 million women between 25 and 54 years of age with children under 18 were not in the work force. That translates to a quarter of women with children under 18 not working for pay. Cohen and Rabin say that within this group, 2.3 million or 24%, have a BA degree or higher. These are the women who are likely to be career-oriented.
The logical next question — how many of those want to relaunch? In 2005, the Center for Work-Life Policy and the Harvard Business Review reported in a study entitled Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success that 93% of women who took career breaks want to return to work.
Cohen and Rabin applied that 93% figure to the 2.3 million colllege-educated women currently not working for pay and came up with a figure of 2.1 million women.
“This number is important,” Cohen and Rabin write, “because it indicates to potential relaunchers on a career break that they are far from alone, and it tells employers that this cohort of women is a force to be reckoned with from a hiring perspective.”
Indeed.
I'm a 48-year-old mother of four living in Great Falls, VA. I've been out of the workforce for nearly 13 years and am ready to get back in.
Another wonderful post Lee Ann! I just wanted to give some commentary on this. This BLS “microdata” was from 2006, and the subset of women ages 25-54 with children under 18 we looked at was the portion of this demographic with a Bachelors degree or higher who was not in the labor force. When you add that extra qualifier, you find that 2.3 million, or almost 23% are not in the labor force. When trying to figure out how many of those women are interested in returning, there were a couple of studies done in 2004 that shed light on the number. The Center for Work Life Policies 93% was one, and there was another study, by CPRi (acquired by Aquent) which said 70% were interested in returning. So we just took an average of these two numbers to get a rough cut at the % of women in this demographic interested in returning and applied it to the 2.3 million. That resulted in approximately 1.9 million women at any given moment, as you pointed out, as women are constantly joining this group when they leave the workforce, and leaving this group when they rejoin the workforce. Thanks for highlighting the “Relaunch Movement”, which shows every sign of growing each year. Over 1,000 people have participated in our Return to Work Conferences and we are running four more this year.
Thanks for a great, informative reply. The fact that iRelaunch is growing is an excellent indication that there is a need for such services.