How sexist views of women lead to lower birth rates

The international edition of Newsweek had an article which finds that the EU undervalues its women in the workplace.

According to a paper published by the International Labor Organization this past June, women account for 45 percent of high-level decision makers in America, including legislators, senior officials and managers across all types of businesses. In the U.K., women hold 33 percent of those jobs. In Sweden—supposedly the very model of global gender equality—they hold 29 percent.
Germany comes in at just under 27 percent, and Italian women hold a pathetic 18 percent of power jobs. These sad statistics say as much about Europe's labor markets, lingering welfare-state policies and corporate leadership as they do about its attitudes toward women. It's not that European women are stuck in the house. (After all, 57 percent of women in the EU 15 work, less than the U.S. rate of 65 percent, but not dramatically so.)

Are these women a victim of a combination of traditional attitudes and social policies which are aimed at and failing to counter a below replacement birth rate? The above article further claims:

Europe is killing its women with ... cushy welfare policies that were created to help them. By offering women extremely long work leaves after children, then pushing them to take the full complement via tax policies that discourage a second income, coupled with subsidies that serve to keep them at home, Europe is essentially squandering its female talent. Not only do women get off track for long periods, many simply never get back on. Nor have European corporations adapted to changing times. Few offer the flextime that makes it easier for women to both work and manage their families. Instead, women tend to get shuffled into part-time work, which is less respected and poorly paid.

And yet, women aren't being sufficiently discouraged from work that they opt to raise families instead. Instead, they are being discouraged on both work and family fronts. From The Economist:

The list of explanations for why German fertility has not rebounded is long. Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Sloan Foundation in New York ticks them off: poor child care; unusually extended higher education; inflexible labour laws; high youth unemployment; and non-economic or cultural factors...
If women postpone their first child past their mid-30s, it may be too late to have a second even if they want one (the average age of first births in most of Europe is now 30). If everyone does the same, one child becomes the norm: a one-child policy by example rather than coercion, as it were. And if women wait to start a family until they are established at work, they may end up postponing children longer than they might otherwise have chosen.

Keeping women in lower positions at work, presumably for fear they will leave work to raise families, means they end up putting off having families due to difficulties in getting their careers established.