What is the connection between the traditional gender role of domesticity and the way some women are treated in the workplace today?

Over the past fifty years, the developed world has seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of women in the workforce. Throughout history as well as in some places today, women have largely been limited to a role as wife, mother, and keeper of the house. Such a priority was placed on a woman's domestic capabilities that it was often impossible or utterly vulgar for a woman to seek a life outside of maternity and marriage. Though this attitude is not as pervasive today, this understanding of traditional gender roles still holds sway in how women are treated in the workplace.

Women in the workforce are often expected to take on junior roles to their male counterparts, or to be a part of supportive staff. For example, many people feel that women are better suited to be nurses than doctors, or secretaries rather than business people. There is an implication that women are either physically or mentally less capable of performing a job as compared to men, or that they may be unreliable and so should take a junior position. This "unreliability" is based on the expectation that a woman does or will have children, and that her role as a mother takes priority over work outside the home. 

What's more, even in places where gender equality may be a public value, the labor of women is systemically undervalued. Even in the United States, where gender equality is preached publicly, women are paid on average twenty to forty cents less per dollar than their male counterparts. Even with exactly the same education and training, and in performing the same tasks, women are routinely paid less than men. This disparity has its roots in the time when women were not allowed to be in control of their own money. It was not until 1974 in the United States that women were allowed to have a personal bank account-- previously, all money had to be deposited under the name of a male member of the family. Though women were increasingly entering the workforce in the United States as early as the 1950's, they were compensated with menial pay on the expectation that their husbands earned enough money to cover all family expenses. 

I do not mean to imply that prior to the 1950's no woman had ever worked outside of the home. This simply isn't true. As early as 4,000 years ago at Lagash, women were employed in large numbers in workshops for weaving. However, at this time the only women who really had a need to work outside the home were orphaned girls, sex workers, the disabled, and those who were otherwise unable to marry. In some parts of the world today, it is only women who cannot marry that work outside the home. Even in the developed Western world, such attitudes persisted until the early 20th century. Prior to the gender revolutions of the mid-20th century, the women who made up the workforce outside the home were fringe members of society.

Though it is not explicitly stated, many women are encouraged to undergo training and take on jobs which conform to traditional gender roles. Women may be encouraged to become a teacher or nurse because these are care-giving,  nurturing jobs. Even in the sciences, women may be pushed out of hard-science like chemistry in favor of the soft or social sciences because these appeal to a woman's "emotional nature." It is unfortunate that even in the most developed and egalitarian of societies, a woman might be expected to fulfill the role of mother-sister-wife to her coworkers when any man might just as well perform the associated tasks, and she might do just as well performing his. As with all systems of oppression, awareness is the first step to remedying this pervasive social structure.