I can only think that women are seen by women as different from men. The head of the National Organisation of Women in the US, Terry O’Neill, wants parity of gender in Obama’s cabinet:

I think that if half of the cabinet were women and half of the Supreme Court and half of Congress were women, we would see a lot more policies for expanding education and health care and social services that allow communities to thrive,’ O’Neill explained. ‘We’d see a lot less spending on military weapons systems, and we would also see a lot less of the most powerful, moneyed people not paying their fair share.’

What happened to the best person for the job? Don’t even ask. And yet there is this other side of the story which suggests that women don’t get to the top because they don’t want to.

‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,’ a recent, widely discussed Atlantic cover story, should help redirect the conversation to the obvious: it’s the kids. The author, Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, described leaving ‘work I loved’—being the director of policy planning at the State Department, and the first female one, at that—to spend more time with her troubled teenage son. She had discovered, you see, that running a government agency means that you don’t see your kids much.

Slaughter stumbled onto a truth that many are reluctant to admit: women are less inclined than men to think that power and status are worth the sacrifice of a close relationship with their children. Academics and policymakers in what’s called the “work/family” field believe that things don’t have to be this way. But nothing in the array of work/family policy prescriptions—family leave, child care, antidiscrimination lawsuits, flextime, and getting men to cut their work hours—will lead women to infiltrate the occupational 1 percent. They simply don’t want to.

And the conclusion after a very long article:

Most women will continue to prefer long maternity leave, reduced hours, and part-time and flexible jobs. The end of men? Not in Alphaville.

The world of work is long, hard, exacting, tedious and competitive especially at the top. It wears you down. If there’s a nicer, sweeter, more gentle alternative it is not surprising when someone chooses that alternative instead.