To my knowledge none of these groups who champion women in IT seem to talk about maternity leave. It mystifies me to be honest. The situation with maternal leave is very problematic because it is available to women only in most countries.

Women get about 10 years into their career and decide to have families. In high tech, my experience has been that maternity leave benefits are common. So women often take up to a year away from work. This puts them at a serious disadvantage. Even if their job waits for them, in the high tech industry, everybody moves on (not sure what the average attrition rate is, but I remember at one point people would change jobs every 2-3 years). So you get back to your job and everything is different. Essentially you are a new hire and you have to work your way back into the political spectrum.

Then imagine that you have a spouse who works in the IT industry. Not only did they not take the year off, but they are plugged into everything thing that's happened and have made relationships with all the new people who have shown up in the last year. It is just natural that those people will be better placed for promotion.

Also I have yet to meet a woman, after spending a year away from work to look after their new born child, who thinks, "I'm so happy to be able to hand my child over to childcare while I'm at work." Naturally you worry -- especially for your first child. Naturally you feel guilty. Naturally you don't want to give up what you have (looking after your child is an awesome job!). If you happen to have enough income coming in because your spouse works, is there really a serious argument for going back to work?

This is fixable. 6 months maternity leave followed by 6 moths paternity leave. Make it a law that spouses have the right to that 6 months. Limit the amount of maternity leave so as not to punish women in the work place. This allows the family to hand over the child to the non-childbearing spouse for 6 months so as to ease the transition of the mother. Then after those 6 months the mother has been back at work and it is the other spouse (very probably male) who has to make the hard decision of whether or not to go back to work. Also, each spouse has taken 6 months off from work and each suffers on the work side equally.

Not to mention that it really sucks that men in our society rarely get the opportunity to interact with their young children simply because they don't have the hardware to gestate a baby.

2 birds, one stone and all that.

P.S. I struggled to write in a way that would include all family styles, but if I unintentionally missed one that you care about, please accept my apologies and consider the idea anyway.