Folks working to 8:30 are working to 8:30 from home or work, both are going to hit people of different backgrounds differently depending on their personal situation as much as anything else.
Unless you're significantly wealthier than your neighbors, most likely the public school for their grade level closest to your home, which you picked in large part for the quality of the schools.
And who is, in the end, the parent usually taking children to school and picking them up, and dashing over to pick them up if they get sick or injured?
The mothers.
For younger children, daycare arrangements were made based on where the primary caregiver (usually, mother) plans to work.
When that plan all of the sudden becomes "compulsory hybrid", you can't just split the kid's time between two daycares - in a lot of places, just getting that first slot was hard and expensive enough.
There's the simple fact that the daycare near your house might not open early enough or stay open late enough to accomodate your commute. Plus, I kind of want to do more with my little kid during the week than get him ready for daycare and get him ready for bed.
These aren't all the reasons that RTO pushes young (and young-ish) women out of the workforce, but are just the first examples that came to my mind.
If it were easier to fall back to part time but stay in tech for a few years, it wouldn't be as big a deal.
While this is true, this has done more to hurt women than the RTO policy. I grew up in New Jersey. When I was 5 years old I started Kindergarten. The first day of school my father walked with me, to show me where the school was. After that I was on my own. And all of the 5 year olds in my neighborhood were also on their own. We were expected to have enough maturity to get ourselves to school, and we did, everyday. We generally walked together, all the 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 year olds. School was exactly 1 kilometer from my house.
If you're looking for something that puts an undue burden on modern women, it's the modern practice that children cannot get to school on their own. They (the children) still somehow manage to get to school on their own in rural areas and in most countries: most of Europe, all of Latin America, Africa, nearly all of Asia.
We should be clear about where the real burdens are coming from. If we could get back to a situation where children could get to school on their own, the situation would be easier for women.
Just as an example of how it plays out in practice, commute time is an externality the company just pushes onto employees. If you’re salaried, you aren’t paid for it despite it being required. This is time which could be used for other things. Of course this affects people more if they have responsibilities outside of their job.
My broader point is that these meetings effectively reframed collective problems, where many women (and men) had shared labor interests, into an individual “grindset” issue. Therefore an RTO mandate which should have been a major dispute was never really questioned.