10 Best Cities for Working Mothers

In advance of Mother’s Day, the media have released dozens of articles about what gifts to buy, what flowers to deliver, what restaurants to eat in and how to please a mother who has everything. Realtor.com released a more practical list, which is the 10 best cities for working mothers, leaving most of the balance of the mother universe behind.

In “The 10 Best American Cities for Working Moms,” the real estate listing firm picked three criteria:

• Career opportunity: Employment rate of women who have children; median women’s salary; women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s; ratio of female to male top executives; flexibility of work schedule, measured by the average length of women’s workday and the percentage of women working at home.
• Care for children: Number of day care facilities for every child under age 5; number of good schools (receiving a rating of 8 to 10 from GreatSchools.org) for every child under age 18; number of pediatric specialists for every child under age 18; average baby sitter rates.
• Affordability: Median home price on realtor.com.

It used its own listing to determine the affordability aspect.
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In the age of income inequality, pay parity may be the most important one. Across the country, the ratio is 79% for women, compared to the pay of men when each works on a full-time basis, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Realtor.com put Orlando in first place on its list of cities for working moms. Women’s pay is 95% of men’s in the Florida city. Second place Minneapolis had a ratio of 91%, and then Pittsburgh at 84%. They were followed by Madison, Wis. (86%); Fort Collins, Colo. (79%); Cincinnati (84%); St. Paul (89%); Durham, N.C. (96%); Washington D.C. (90%); and Seattle (79%).

24/7 Wall St.’s related article, “20 Worst Paying Jobs for Women,” found that the worst paying industry was “securities, commodities and financial services sales agents jobs.” In that field, women are paid 52.5% of what men are. Perhaps the best gift for mothers who work in this profession is to find them a new job in an unrelated industry.