In general, you are right. Amongst super highly educated pairs I don’t think this is the same issue- highly educated mothers overwhelming return to work, see ht

In general, you are right. Amongst super highly educated pairs I don’t think this is the same issue- highly educated mothers overwhelming return to work, see http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/chapter-2-stay-at-home-mothers-by-demographic-group/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/chapter-2-stay-at-... which indicates mothers with a bachelors and higher work 79% of the time at any given time. Heck, assuming a 20 year motherhood window (2 kids in 2 years and stop) that translates to only 4 years out of the workforce per mother. It’s a fair assumption women with professional degrees leave to workforce on average even less. I guess you need to push up the numbers a bit because there are more women in the newer cohorts and those cohorts are in prime childbearing and rearing age, but that probably balances out with needing to take account of the women never having children (and not included in that statistic.) We aren’t talking about dropping off the executive/promo track, it’s returning to work in the same profession at all. All that being said, it looks like it’s the backlog, not dropout. Less than 10% of US med school grads were women in the 70s (https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women-are-doctors-and-lawyers-than-ever-but-progress-is-stalling/266115/ https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women...). Assume a 40 year career and 34% female is right about where you’d expect the numbers to be.