The fundamental unaddressed issue in our society is that having children is treated as something that's optional, a luxury, and even though the society fundamen

The fundamental unaddressed issue in our society is that having children is treated as something that's optional, a luxury, and even though the society fundamentally depends on its constituents procreating, we continue to pretend that having children is not a necessary part of one's life. Which is true individually, but not true on the macro level. Anecdotally, observing my own family and that of my (mostly well-off STEM) social circle, I can tell you that this is when women really take a hit career-wise. What's less obvious in the graphs is that many of them take it deliberately, and _choose_ to focus on things other than career. This, ironically, puts pressure on men to provide, and compete in the workplace. I know it put pressure on me like you wouldn't believe - we "settled", got a mortgage, monthly expenses went through the roof. I've roughly tripled my earnings between the time my son was born and his 10th birthday. It came at a tremendous personal cost - I basically didn't have a life for a decade, and our marriage nearly fell apart. I like where we are today, though, thanks to all that effort. My wife took a couple of years off work, and did not aim for a quick career progression afterwards, preferring lower stress and more family time. Was my career progression done at the expense of someone less motivated at work? Quite likely, yes. Was it worth it to my family? It was, although there were many times when I was in doubt about that. This is something the workforce percentage graphs do not communicate at all.