PhD Chemist here…
I just want to make sure you all know that there are multitude of reasons for PhDs to go into high school teaching and most of them don’t have to do with poor job prospects.
A lot of people go into PhDs thinking they’re going to be professors, where they’ll get to influence and feed young minds. During the PhD, you’ll learn that academia isn’t just that. The pressure, the politics, the luck involved in getting science to work, etc. drive a lot of grad students (especially at top universities) to constantly re-evaluate their career choices. Some realize that they really enjoy purely teaching, engaging in pedagogy - and that that’s best accomplished in teaching high school. From my Stanford cohort, there are 3 high school teachers. They chose that because they loved doing outreach and teaching younger people, and started tailoring their grad school experience for that line of work well before graduation.
The other thing is that a lot of PhD research positions, academic or industry are not very portable. If you work in pharma, you’ll work in Boston, New Jersey or California, maybe Indianapolis or Chicago. That’s about it. If you’re in petrochem, you’re in Texas or Oklahoma. There are huge swaths of the country where they only employ a handful of PhDs. In academia, you go where the job is. There’s a lot of competition and each department hires in earnest maybe once every 3 years - you don’t really have any say over where you land your first job.
With a family or SO, PhDs have a hard time finding the right job in the right place. It’s one of the reasons I’ve delayed having a family. Now I’ve landed a permanent job in the middle of nowhere. It’s a great job, I love it, and I intend to stay for a long time. That’s where I’ll start my family. But if you have a 2-body problem, there are more location-flexible jobs you can do with a PhD. One of those is teaching. You can also go into patent work (can involve more school).
PhD chemists starting at large companies make ~$80-100k plus signing bonus, depending on industry. Semi-conductor industry pays more, but then you have to live in pretty high-COL areas. Assistant professors at research universities and staff scientists at government facilities are paid similarly. Small LACs pay much worse. This is the most recent freely available salary survey: https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/careers/salaries/new-graduates-cen-2013.pdf
Keep in mind that about half of PhD earners go on to a postdoc (either to expand skillset for industry or in hopes of landing a professorship) where the going rate back in 2013 was probably ~$30-40k, which makes the median earnings figure skew low.