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If you want to marry an educated woman with ~92% of your income potential and expect them to forgoe most of that income by raising your kids you have to accept worse terms than your grandfather did when he married someone with 60% of his income potential.
Then why do men struggle to find women who want to be homemakers?
My answer is people are status seeking and prefer to marry within their class. Middle and upper class women have unprecedented career opportunities in a society where status comes from career rather than family. The absolute standard of living for home makers has never been higher but the opportunity cost of motherhood is also at an all time high. Lower class women don't face the same opportunity costs but upper and middle class men don't want to marry lower class women and deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.
Checks out with my perceptions. Female co-workers who get pregnant are in zero rush to return to the office, often registering glee that they get to duck out of staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day; a good number strongly hinting that they have no intention of resuming their work, but don't want to tip off their superiors yet. Those that do return often only do so for a little bit before checking out entirely. You follow up with them on Facebook at a later date and see they have fully transitioned to homemaking and child-raising, with maybe a small side gig.
I've only known one exception; lady formerly in the Navy on her third pregnancy who has always taken the bare minimum of maternity leave before jumping back in the workforce. I once joked that she should milk it for all its worth, and she actually registered some serious judgments against women who do that, and recalled that even in the Navy she noticed how many peers would suddenly find themselves knocked up when deployment came up. "Freeloading, fucking whores" were her words.
No impugnation intended on my end either. I don't blame any of them for ditching cubicle life, and I have moments of almost immaturely wishing I could get pregnant, if only to have a readily-accepted excuse to escape its doldrums. The women who left are displaying perfect sanity, and I don't think it reflects badly on any of their work ethics for the reason you point out.
My last paragraph was mostly included as an interesting anecdote because of how much it struck me coming from a woman's mouth. It's the kind of comment that is typically pattern matched to a certain male 'MRA' type that certainly exists online, but I've never heard uttered in the real world. I'm sure some men think it but have the sense to never vocalize it. But when I do hear something that cutting and uninhibited, it is nearly always from women directed at other women. An interesting dynamic with probably other observable parallels, but another topic.
Yeah, this all intuitively rolled into my mind after the incident. Not shocking in any revelatory sense; more a "this how things really be" reminder/wake-up from the artificial, socialized script everybody's trained to have - particularly in a corporate environment.
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