Top cities for working moms...

Forbes recently published their 2nd attempt at ranking US cities in the perspective of a working mom. http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/24/best-us-cities-working-mothers-employment-family-forbes-woman-leadership-parenting.html The criteria used to calculate the rankings include cost of living, pediatricians in the area, crime, unemployment, women's earnings and spendings per pupil in public schools. While these may seem all-encompassing on the surface, they really don't get to the heart of what working mom's desire. From my perspective (mom of a 5-month old so still relatively new to this), some of the things they missed were quality and quantity open green spaces, cost of QUALITY day care (who cares if day care is cheap if you are frantically worried about your child all day!), family friendly workplaces (i.e. sick leave, paid time off, flexible hours, etc., family friendly activites offered in the evenings/weekends, and networking opportunities for working moms to name a few. If I live in an area with the highest paid earnings, but the workplace is hostile towards working moms and daycare costs an arm and a leg, then it's not a very good city for a working mom now, is it? Even if my workplace is ideal, if at the end of the day/week, I don't have any way to network or meet other working moms, then my community is lacking. This last point is very important to me. Nearly all the programs geared towards infants where I would meet and connect with other moms happen during the day, M-F! Where are the evening/weekend programs for the rest of us? forbes has missed the mark for a second year in a row. I hope they take into consideration the comments left by their readers. Granted, these are very difficult aspects to gauge mathematically. I'm sure one of their working moms can come up with a clever solution!