By Heidi Brown
The Top 20: America's Best Cities
for Working Parents
The Complete List Of Best Cities For Working
Parents
The Full Methodology
This year ForbesWoman inaugurates its first annual list of the Best
Cities for Working Mothers. To calculate the rankings, we started
with the 50 largest cities in the U.S. and the premise that
different mothers have different needs. So while it's safe to
say that all moms want a secure and protected place for their
children to live in, first-rate medical care and excellent schools,
if they're running a business or earning a paycheck, there are
other important considerations.
The potential for a relatively high income, job opportunities and
family-friendly cost of living are obvious ones. But childcare is
way up there too. Some big cities that seem like choice places to
raise a family, such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Orlando, Fla.,
offer comparatively fewer childcare options--including daycare
centers and pre-K--for moms who work.
We took a slightly unusual
approach to evaluating a city’s health care quality. We realized a
mom wants options when it comes to pediatricians; trust and a good
rapport are just as important as competence, after all. But we also
included information from Dartmouth Atlas, which tracks the quality
of health care across the U.S.
Researchers at Atlas,
affiliated with Dartmouth College, have found that cities with a
higher proportion of primary care physicians to specialist
physicians have a better health care system. When there are more
general practice physicians, their research suggests, a mom has a
greater chance of getting in to see a doc when she needs one, and
her child's care will be more closely overseen.
We also used two different
data sets to evaluate education--the amount a city spends per pupil
and ratings given by parents whose own kids attend a city's
schools. The latter data comes to us exclusively from GreatSchools,
a nonprofit which works to involve parents nationwide in improving
school quality.
So how did New York
and Austin end up as Nos. 1 and 2 of the same list? Austin
does have a reputation for offering a high quality of living for
all age groups, but New York is a playground for grownups, not a
sanctuary for kids and their moms, right?
Answer: Austin and New York
each shine in different categories of what a working (or
job-seeking) ForbesWoman reader wants in her city of choice.
New York
is--unfairly--known for being crowded and dangerous. But what it
does have is plentiful park space and a low violent crime rate.
Salaries there are also good, among the six highest of the cities
we surveyed.
And the Big Apple is
generous when it comes to what it spends on educating its students,
coming in at the second highest, right behind another New York
metropolitan area, Buffalo-Niagara Falls.
Austin parents love their
schools. The city's unemployment, at 6.1%, is one of the lowest
of the cities on our list. Like New York, it also boasts plenty of
outdoor places for the kids to work off steam. Both cities score
high for plentiful childcare options.
Do you agree with our
results? What data categories would you like to see in next
year's list?
The Top 20: America's Best Cities for Working Parents
The Complete List Of Best Cities For Working
Parents
