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Not OP, but the obvious rejoinder is that the company but outsources all of the opportunity cost to the employees. The real question is why the prospective employee is so heavily discounting the opportunity cost.
Ding ding.
There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.
But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.
Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
I think it’s because they don’t trust men to do what they say they’ll do. The feminist attack on Harrison butker- aimed at their own audience- wasn’t ‘you deserve a career’. It was an evidence free assertion that he beats his wife. A lot of the ‘why do women give up X to not be dependent on a man’ has an answer, and that answer is ‘they think a man will abuse them if they’re dependent, or otherwise not fulfill his side of the bargain because he thinks he can get away with it’. This belief may be neurotic and unfounded, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t exist and inform the behavior of a lot of very risk averse people.
I encourage you to go talk to the socially conservative housewives in whichever sect that practices female domesticity is easiest to access; they will tell you that their particular sect has figured out how to make men behave, but women out in the world have to go into the corporate world, poor things, because they can’t depend on their men.
This is where fathers (and to a lesser extent brothers and uncles) are supposed to provide that safety net. I need to be wealthy enough to take care of my girls if they get into a bad situation with a future husband.
I'd argue your father, brothers and uncles are actually supposed to provide you with a safety net if you get into a bad situation with your fiancé/husband by giving him a severe beating.
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I can second that, and I've heard exactly the same sentiment from my wife (who is very successful in her well-paid career). This was instilled in her by her mother, who worked a fake government job helping applicants fill paperwork for farm subsidies. She was paid peanuts compared to her husband, but she prided herself at being independent (even though everything was actually paid for by her husband).
Women just don't want to be dependent on their husbands, because they heard a lot of horror stories of abusive husbands, and so they want to maintain a put option ready to exercise. Usually, however, they suck at pricing this option, especially the theta.
You're both right. At the end, this is what all this eventually boils down to.
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Maybe this comes down to a drive for status and status alone? If they are encultured in a society that gives less status to mothers/housewives than it does to those in corporate positions, moving up the corporate pecking order would be the rational choice for a status-seeking agent. The exceptions—Mormons, traditional Catholics, Amish, etc.—are cultures that afford status to mothers of larger broods of children.
It's not a drive for status. It's a terror of being dependent on men. Mormons, tradCaths, Amish, etc have gotten around this by convincing their women and girls that their men will treat them well, it's the ones outside, out in the world, that you should scared of. Obviously that's harder to do on a society wide scale.
Or perhaps by convincing their men to actually treat them well?
If the rumors of (for instance) the Black community are remotely true, then, yes, it's better to be dependent on the US government, despite its flaws.
I’m not doubting that- poor treatment of women probably varies on the exact same axes as everything else, which means church attending middle class white men are fantastically unlikely to mistreat their wives and poor black men are likely enough that being dependent on one is foolhardy. And sure, Mormons and tradCaths have some social technology that makes it even less likely.
Just that this is a pitch which is hard for an entire society to make because it kind of depends on being a socially conservative minority subculture with strong endogamy norms.
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My model of modern western women™ is basically this:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.
Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.
If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her endeavours in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.
This is my lived experience, but it took my wife entering a well-compensated corporate position in her mid '30s where her superiors were mothers of young children for her to entertain the idea of kids. Before that (and I mean, from her late-teens when I first met her), she had a laser-focus on her career.
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I think I touch on this in my last paragraph. From the perspective of the person choosing to have children (or not) a lot of the social benefit of having and raising a child comes in the form of a positive externality they don't receive. Maybe it's an opportunity cost for society to, in some sense, have someone work rather than raise children but that externality isn't an opportunity cost for the people doing the choosing, they were never going to receive that benefit anyway.
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