Unlike some other posters, I don't see women's lower earnings and slower career advancement after having children as being a problem to be solved by society but as a natural result of decisions they make. Virginia Postrel agrees in a Wall Street Journal essay published today:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704461304576216651515154140.html'Mommy Track' Without Shame: A notorious article urging flexibility is proven right
Motherhood, it seems, is the Middle East of social controversy. Alliances may shift, new dogmas and leaders may arise, tactics may change, but the fundamental conflict resists resolution. Despite the efforts of would-be peacemakers, impassioned partisans continue battling to claim all the territory as their own. My way, they declare, is the one right way to be a good mother, a real woman, a fulfilled human being.
Fortunately, nobody dies in the mommy wars (a term popularized by Newsweek 21 years ago). And, despite the ongoing verbal assaults, American women have actually established a modus vivendi. Most continue to have and raise children and, in greater numbers than ever before, to combine motherhood not just with jobs but careers�vocations in which they make long-term investments and from which they derive not only income but personal satisfaction and identity.
Irony of ironies, they do so largely by following the advice of Felice Schwartz, who ignited the first great conflagration of the modern mommy wars with her 1989 Harvard Business Review article "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," or, as it was immediately and derisively labeled, "The Mommy Track."
Ms. Schwartz, who died in 1996, began with the idea that not all professional women are alike. Some focus primarily on careers, making "the same trade-offs traditionally made by the men who seek leadership positions." But most want children, and once they have kids, these "talented and creative" women, "are willing to trade some career growth and compensation for freedom from the constant pressure to work long hours and weekends."
<rest of article at link>
The original 1989 Mommy Track article is at
http://hbr.org/1989/01/management-women-and-the-new-facts-of-life/ar/1 and a discussion of it at Slate, "The Mommy Track Turns 21: Why it no longer deserves a bad rap from feminists." is at
http://www.slate.com/id/2249312/ .
