"Careers" are crap.
You are always nothing more than a long-term contractor working at below market rates, to be terminated whenever you appear less useful or a bit older than you once were. A career is really an apprenticeship for running your own business, and the younger one makes that transition the better off one will be.
Feminists seem to think (paternalistically) that women can call themselves successful if they can carve out an affirmative action role next to successful young executive Bob Loblaw in the years before he becomes CEO of MegaCorp, because Bob has coattails and will lift those who helped him into high offices beside him as long as they work 80 hours a week and polish Bob's shoes on Sundays.
Corporate America, of course, does not work that way - as Bob's senior staff will be made up of a few trusted, non-affirmative action insiders...plus some top outsiders stolen from the competition at a higher price than MegaCorp would ever pay Miss Affirmative Action. Meanwhile, she has just turned 40 and has missed out on marriage and family for essentially nothing, because all the money she made went to pay for the lifestyle she needed to maintain as an up-and-coming MegaCorp executive.
But CEO Bob has managed to have a wife and two kids in Greenwich, CT.
The point is, women can't really do things in the order men do them. A reinvented social order where women married by 21,had two or three kids, sent them off to (preferably private) school, then went back to college and emerged in their early thirties as wiser, more experienced human beings with a lot to offer a potential employer would make much more sense. But when presented with that concept feminists would revert immediately to kindergarten form: "No fair! Bobby got his big salary first!" :)
That, my FRiend, is a wise respone from someone who correctly interpreted what he has witnessed in life.
I used to teach the introductory Management course to college undergraduates. Towards the end of the course we had a session on managing your own career (if you don't manage your career, someone else will and you won't like it). My personal advice to the women in the class was to imitate Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. "Have your children first, then become Prime Minister." Or whatever is their personal equivalent of becoming Prime Minister.