Law and medicine are perhaps worse because these professions impose relatively rigid career tracks upon their members. It's well and good to work 80+ hours/week at a "white shoe" law firm when you're in your late 20's without children. But, even the time off required to push out a baby and recover will have a negative impact on your billable quota. A couple years ago, a friend's firm adopted some new, supposedly mommy-friendly policies in hope of keeping more women on partner track. A few months later, they did a round of lay-offs which included her. She had been working part-time post-child after having received glowing reviews pre-pregnancy. Other firms have done better by offering non-partner track roles which paid less, but offered 40-hour work weeks -- a realistic option taken by a couple of women I know. Perhaps the whole up-or-out partner track model of traditional law firms must change. It's clearly from an era where the rising star was expected to have a stay-at-home wife to take care of things. It can't be the only model by which law can be practiced successfully. This model also adversely affects those opting into law as a second career.

Physicians finish residency around age 30 -- about the average age for college-educated women to have a first child. A friend of ours had to delay residency by two years because a pregnancy required bed rest at the time she was supposed to be finishing up her internship year. The next year's match class was already full. So, after a MD/PhD and fellowship, she will have her first real job at age 37. Maybe the traditional model of "lots and lots of school" followed by being a full-fledged doctor could be replaced by some sort of stepping-stone model which where one could opt out of the rat race for a couple of years in the middle. I'm imagining a path that allows on to practice as doctor-lite (like a nurse practitioner) and later become a full-fledged doctor.

I don't think one can "have it all" -- meaning that a parent can't compete successfully with those willing to sacrifice their lives to work and still show up at the after-school soccer games. Society will have to figure out alternatives for those models of success built-up in the era where it would have been redundant to prepend "stay-at-home" to "wife."

I'm not suggesting that there's anything morally/ethically wrong with the way law firms work today. If a private business wants to limit the available work force through an incentive system that's not fully utilizable by 50% of the population, that's its right. I'm not so comfortable with making a similar statement about medicine because the rites of passage are implicitly set by government regulation rather than market forces. It's not as if I can start-up a certification program for high-end health professionals which will compete with the AMA's MD designations.