Mothers married to the lowest-earning men struggle to find jobs that pay enough to cover child care costs, which are increasingly unaffordable. 配偶收入处于底层水平的女性在尽力寻找足以补贴家庭支出费用的工作，而这些费用的日益上涨也让人难以负担。

Over the past decade, child care costs have risen twice as fast as the median income of families with children. 在过去10年里，育儿费用已经上涨至普通家庭平均收入的两倍。

The cost for two children (an infant and a four-year-old) to go to a day care center is greater than the annual median rent payment in every state in the country. 在美国各州，送两个孩子去日间幼儿园的花销比全年房租的平均数还高。

Women married to men with greater resources leave for a variety of reasons, but one important factor is the number of hours that their husbands work. 配偶收入更高的已婚女性退出职场也有各种各样的原因，其中很重要的一个因素是女性为迁就其丈夫的工作时间而做出牺牲。

When husbands work fifty or more hours per week, wives with children are 44 percent more likely to quit their jobs than wives with children whose husbands work less. 如果其丈夫每周工作50个小时以上，那些带孩子的女性或较丈夫工作时间更少的女性，辞职的可能性要高出40%。

Many of these mothers are those with the highest levels of education. 这部分女性中很多人都具有高等教育背景。

A 2007 survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that while men's rates of full-time employment never fell below 91 percent, 2007年哈佛商学院关于毕业生的调查结果表明，男性的全职工作率高于91%，

only 81 percent of women who graduated in the early 2000s and 49 percent of women who graduated in the early 1990s were working full-time. 而毕业于2000年初和1990年初的女性中从事全职工作的比例分别为81%和49%。

Of Yale alumni who had reached their forties by 2000, only 56 percent of the women remained in the workforce, compared with 90 percent of the men. 2000年，那些近40岁的耶鲁大学毕业生中，只有56%的女性还留在职场，而男性的比例则是90%。

This exodus of highly educated women is a major contributor to the leadership gap. 高学历女性大批离开职场是造成领导层性别差距的一个主要因素。