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I am not so sure that the suggested availability of high quality childcare really helps those numbers in STEM.

In Nordic countries (I live in Finland), which are quite well known for having good quality childcare available to all families at low cost, the situation has not increased placement of women in STEM professions.

In fact, quite the opposite: the more "gender-equal" a society, the fewer women study STEM subjects.

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Is it possible that the problem there is the amount of women starting studies in stem fields? I don’t have any numbers but anecdotal evidence of two Helsinki based schools in CS related programs had very lopsided gender ratios in bachelors and masters levels.

Okay, I looked it up and apparently CS is the only stem field where there seems to be significant bias (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/edu-kumpula/2019/10/10/faculty-of-...)

The correlation of women in STEM graduates and Global Gender Gap index is negative: the higher gender equality, the lower the proportion of women graduating from STEM subjects.

Possible reasons are considered in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

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