opt out?

I am a single mom, who works fulltime to pay for her child’s private school education and the suburban house mortgage. I have been working my entire adult life, having been brought up with the notion ‘women in no way are inferior to men as far as intellect is concerned’, it was a brutal blow when I was told at the highly coveted job at campus recruiting, even though you are the most qualified for this job we cannot hire you because you are a woman.
That was the beginning. Since, I have seen a lot of subtle and not so subtle ways in which I have had to work hard in a market place that is almost entirely comprised of men. It has been harder since I had a child. I have known days when I felt like I was living surrounded by Neanderthals, what happened to the so called post-feministic era? And I have often wondered, enviously I might add, about those lucky women who 'opted out' to be moms.

And apparently I am not the only one who wonders.
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Graff.asp
Do they really opt out? Or are they getting a little help from the system?

Still, if they were pushed out, why would smart, professional women
insist that they chose to stay home? Because that’s the most emotionally healthy
course: wanting what you’ve got. “That’s really one of the agreed-upon
principles of human nature. People want their attitudes and behavior to be in
sync,”

The article has many interesting ideas, like, what propels the moms-go-home campaign ? The usual suspects are lowered opportunity for women who are moms, high barriers to re-entry and a family hostile workplace. But there is another, interesting though very intuitive co-relation-

the all-or-nothing workplace. At every income level, Americans work
longer hours today than fifty years ago. Mandatory overtime for blue- and
pink-collar workers, and eighty-hour expectations for full-time professional
workers, deprive everyone of a reasonable family life.

A recent snarky book about French women I read mentioned the oh – so unbelievable work ethic of the French; with 6 weeks of paid vacation and so forth, but what we often forget is how hard and how much we have to work here in the good ol’ land of opportunity with the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.
Out of 168 countries surveyed by Jody Heymann, who teaches at both the Harvard School of Public Health and McGill University, the U.S. is one of only five without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.
Good company I would say!
So, while I write my treatise on ‘ Zen and the art of work life balance’ which helps me work without tuning out or burning out, and not being trampled penniless by the charging herds of corporate America, I take hope in knowing I am not alone pondering the way out of this madness.