Harvard Business School: Women are not to blame for the 'glass celing' - the cost of childcare is

It isn’t a lack of ability or ambition that’s the reason for a vast gender gap, nor is it because women choose family life over work. In fact, the main reason is the increasing rise of the cost of childcare, according to Harvard Business School.

A survey of more than 25,000 graduates of Harvard Business School showed that men and women have similar professional ambitions and rank the importance of family equally. Yet only 41% of women were in senior management positions compared to 57% of men.

Tamara Straus, Editorial Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, told Cal Alumni Association’s California magazine that affordable child care is the problem: “We have ended up with three months of maternity leave, 16 days of vacation, and a hodgepodge of ‘choices’ that depend on whether we have a man, money, or family to help us along.