Women have made enormous progress on the lower and middle rungs of the career ladder, but we are failing to make the leap into senior positions. Everyone jumps to the conclusion that it's motherhood that holds women back, but often the big roadblock is the lack of executive presence.

Recently we've been hearing a lot about women "having it all." Myself, I think that is not really an accurate description of female lives today. It seems to me that what we have been up to is DOING it all.

Women of my age in America are at the mercy of two powerful and antagonistic traditions. The first is the ultradomestic fifties with its powerful cult of motherhood; the other is the strident feminism of the seventies with its attempt to clone the male competitive model.... Only in America are these ideologies pushed to extremes.

Quite simply, promotions are not just functions of ability, values, or the numbers you hit, but also rest critically on how you are perceived.

The degree to which the child-rearing professionals continue to be out of touch with reality is astounding. For example, a widely read manual on breast-feeding, devotes fewer than two pages to the working mother.

For women the wage gap sets up an infuriating Catch-22 situation. They do the housework because they earn less, and they earn lessbecause they do the housework.

Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as thespecial responsibility of mothersany shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood.