Book excerpt: Nearly half of all highly educated, high-earning women are childless. The more successful the woman, the less likely it is she has a partner or a baby. For men, the opposite is true: the more successful he is professionally, the more likely it is that he will be married with children. These women have not chosen to be childless. Indeed, most of them yearn for a baby and have gone to extraordinary lengths to become pregnant, often derailing their careers in the process. However, this volume reminds us that, despite the allure and apparent success of IVF treatment, only three to five per cent of women aged 40 and above manage to conceive this way. The age-old business of having babies is eluding an entire generation of successful women: they can be astronauts, chief executives, and politicans but, increasingly, they cannot be mothers. This text looks at why.