It's not rocket science

It takes a bunch of university researchers to tell us what we already know: that women who work and have children have been completely screwed up by society. To judge from any of my beleaguered female colleagues, who try to excel at both home and work with little help, support, or understanding from anyone, these women have been putting up with crap coming from every side. Women are expected to hold full time jobs, in which they incongruously continue to earn less than their male counterparts, (WTF is up with that?) in a country where neither the government nor the corporations who employ them have any interest in providing them with decent day care; hell, any day care, for their children. Why? Because Americans are obsessed with one thing only, even if it means having the worst quality of life for the most powerful industrialized country on Earth and that is: they don't want to pay no taxes. Not one red cent. So the most powerful country on Earth provides no health care for its citizens, public schools are terrible, there is no affordable day care, the poor are ignored, etc.
I hate paying taxes too, particularly when I know they are all probably going towards funding the Iraqi expedition that is going on so brilliantly. Call me a commie, or a pinko, but I understand that society is not just a bunch of people who only scratch their own backs. I understand that just as citizens have rights, the state has an obligation to provide them with certain necessary services, like healthcare and education, so that there is a better, more equal standard of living and a better quality of life for all, not only the stinking rich. Here it works the other way around: proportionally, a wealthy couple pays less taxes than a single working mother. I don't see how that helps the economy in any way; I do see more and more homeless people of all genders and even ages, begging in the streets of New York.
Many European countries provide very affordable quality day care options so that mothers can balance work and motherhood better. Here, women are on their own. They have been screaming about needing urgent support forever and nobody has listened. Probably the only way that anybody will ever listen is if they drop out of the work force in dramatic numbers and that impacts the bottom line. That's all people care about in this country.