I think the point the parent is trying to make is that saying that "participation of women in the workplace" isn't a directly-correlated metric for the "how happy / empowered / established / productive are women in this society" metric that we all care about improving.

To put it another way, if we just take the former metric as the gold measure it is better to be payed to care for someone else's children than to not be payed to care for your own.