'We women need more such (equal opportunities) companies to reach the top'

Women are consensus builders. They really do look for different ways to resolve things. They are innovative and creative thinkers. And they do act on instinct and intuition. In any number of professions-law, medicine, IT, business-equal or nearly equal numbers of men and women were hired out of college or grad school. But over time, the women seemed to disappear, a trend that has continued over the last couple of decades. This raises some serious questions:

Why are women still so scarce at the highest levels? Even though more and more women are entering the 'pipeline'-being hired into entry-level positions in a wide variety of fields-why are so few still making it to the top? Why does the pipeline drip? There's no simple answer. Some of the reasons are obvious: Balancing big jobs with small children is still a challenge.

Others are more insidious: Women are locked out of the informal networks where important business gets done. We also have to recognize that men and women often want different things-women want different things, for different reasons, at different times in their lives. And finally, we need to rethink the workplace in response to those differences. Increasingly, employers are realizing that they can be more flexible.

That they can root out the invisible barriers that poison careers like so much toxic gas. And as employers like Reliance create new and innovative ways to offer women more choices, and better choices, they're finding a huge reservoir of untapped talent. Plugging the dripping pipeline isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do.

There's no question that balancing work and family is still particularly hard on women.

Regardless of whether they have paying jobs, women still spend significantly more time taking care of the kids and managing the household than the men in their lives.

While women no longer feel that they have to hide their families, they still fight the realities-and the assumptions-that come with motherhood. They are waiting for the connection between gender and parenting to be broken. Domestic burdens are not the only reason the pipeline drips.

Hidden barriers, particularly at the highest levels, also block women's paths. Studies show that when they quit corporate jobs, women cite lack of opportunity and general dissatisfaction-not family responsibility-as the main reasons.

I am proud to be working for Reliance, an equal opportunity employer, which cherishes women on top. We women need more such companies to reach to the top.

We have realized that while the firms are hiring equal numbers of men and women out of college, 10 years later most of the women would have gone.

A few years ago, the Harvard Business Review generated a lot of attention with a study called Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success. The survey of mid-career women who held graduate degrees or college degrees with honors found that 37% had taken extended breaks from work, stepping off the fast track, on average, for a little over 2 years. Most of them wanted to return to work, but less than half could find full-time jobs. The old idea was, all you needed to do was fill the pipeline with women and wait around for a couple of decades for them to move through the ranks. But there's an enormous amount of seepage from the pipeline-once women off-ramp for even a short while, it's incredibly difficult to get back in.

A few initiatives that could help to break the glass ceiling are: Training, mentoring, advisory, support groups, and leadership development. This could be coupled with policies and programs that will enable women in the long run to crack this so-called glass ceiling.