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occupations, and therefore having lower earning capacity, whether as an independent practitioner or as an employee of a firm.

Careers involving military combat in a high-tech age are likewise careers that are hard to leave and resume a few years later because weapons technology changes rapidly and continuously, so that a combat pilot or a nuclear submarine officer who returns to active duty after a few years away would find it hard to catch up on technological changes made while he or she was away, while at the same time trying to keep abreast of the continuing changes taking place after returning to active duty.

From the standpoint of a young woman looking ahead when making career choices, the relative rates of obsolescence of given knowledge and skills in a given field becomes a serious consideration in choosing a field in which to specialize. It has been estimated that a physicist loses half the value of his or her knowledge in four years, while a professor of English would take more than a quarter of a century to lose half the value of the knowledge with which he or she began that career.2 2

Given the asymmetrical effects of career obsolescence on women and men, it is hardly surprising that women tend to work in fields with lower rates of obsolescence— as teachers and librarians, for example, rather than as computer engineers or tax accountants. Even as the proportion of women receiving Ph.D.s rose dramatically from the 1970s on, male-female differences in the fields of specialization remained large. As of 2005, for example, women received more than 60 percent of the doctorates in education but less than 20 percent of the doctorates in engineering.2 3

Regular and Irregular Work

While many jobs have regular nine-to-five hours, many others require putting in whatever hours happen to be required, whenever and wherever they happen to be required. When a multimillion-dollar lawsuit is in progress or a death penalty case is being appealed, the attorneys involved cannot simply quit work at five o'clock and go home. If the case requires working nights and weekends, then the attorneys have to work nights and

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weekends, in order to build the strongest case they can before they are scheduled to appear in court.

In principle, it does not matter whether the attorney is male or female but, in practice, with women more often than men carrying the burden of domestic responsibilities for children and the care of the home, careers that involve much unpredictable night and weekend work are less attractive to women. Having it all— a career and a family and an upscale lifestyle— is fine but doing it all is often harder for a woman, given the usual division of domestic responsibilities between the sexes and the inevitable differences in childbearing. Those young women who think ahead may take this into account in choosing a career, while older professional women have often decided that "having it all" is not worth the toll it exacts.

This may not put a whole profession off-limits but it can restrict the range of work situations within a given profession. Thus women who want to be attorneys may tend to find being a civil service attorney with regular hours to be more attractive than working in a leading high-pressure law firm, where the work week not only averages 60 or 70 hours, but where those hours may have to be worked at whatever unpredictable times the client's case requires. Large law firms with offices in several cities or countries may require an attorney to fly off to some distant place on short notice and stay there for whatever period of time it takes to settle some legal matters at that location.

In principle, this is the same problem for men and women. In practice, however, a mother is more likely to stay home with the children while the father is tied up at the office, or has to fly off someplace to deal with legal emergencies, than a father is to stay home while the mother does the same. Moreover, since men are never pregnant, women are disadvantaged in such work by the physical limitations of pregnancy, which can be work limitations as well in jobs that require long, irregular and unpredictable hours, and sudden trips to distant places, as well as the heightened stress of high-stakes legal cases. A Harvard Business Review survey among people whose earnings were in the top 6 percent showed that 62 percent worked more than 50 hours a week and 35 percent worked more than 60 hours a week. Among those who held "extreme" jobs— extreme in both hours and stress—

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less than one-fifth were women. Moreover, even among those people who held such high-pressure jobs, women were only half as likely as men to say that they wanted to still be working like this five years afterwards.2 4

Such pressures are not confined to business and the law. A noted professor of biology pointed this out in advice to his students:

I have been presumptuous enough to counsel new Ph.D.'s in biology as follows: If you choose an academic career you will need forty hours a week to perform teaching and administrative duties, another twenty hours on top of that to conduct respectable research, and still another twenty hours to accomplish really important research.25

A number of studies have shown that women are far less likely than men to choose occupations that require very long hours.2 6 A follow-up study of mathematically gifted youngsters now in their thirties found a higher proportion of women than men working less than 40 hours a week and a higher proportion of men than women working 50 or more hours a week.2 7

In general, men and women alike tend to prefer regular hours and less stressful work, so that jobs with these characteristics can attract both sexes more readily and, because of supply and demand, pay less than similar jobs in more taxing situations. However, to the extent that the less taxing jobs fit in with domestic responsibilities that fall disproportionately on women and so attract women especially, male-female income differences can be considerable even if men and women are paid the same in both the taxing and the non-taxing work environments, if women and men are distributed differently between the different environments within the same profession, as well as being distributed differendy among different occupations. The Economist magazine observed:

The main reason why women still get paid less on average than men is not that they are paid less for the same jobs but that they tend not to climb so far up the career ladder, or they choose lower-paid occupations, such as nursing and teaching.28

That is confirmed by other studies. Among the jobs where women with college degrees earn at least as much as men are computer engineer, petroleum engineer, and a variety of other engineering occupations, as well

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as journalist, portfolio manager and medical technologist.2 9 But in most of these jobs, especially most engineering jobs, there are fewer women than men. The most important reason why women earn less than men is not that they are paid less for doing the very same work but that they are distributed differendy among jobs and have fewer hours and less continuity in the labor force. Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old— that is, beyond the child-bearing years— men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000.3 0 But, despite the fact that women in this category earned more than men in the same category, gross income differences in favor of men continue to reflect differences in work patterns between the sexes, so that women and men are not in the same categories to the same extent.

Even women who have graduated from top-level universities like Harvard and Yale have not worked full-time, or worked at all, to the same extent that male graduates of these same institutions have. Among Yale alumni in their forties, "only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men," according to the New York Times.31 It was much the same story at Harvard:

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30's and 40's.32

Those who reach the highest echelons in many industries and professions have typically worked not only long hours but continuously throughout a long career. Even the most highly educated women have often chosen not to do that, with obvious implications for their incomes. While those women are the best judges of what suits their own individual circumstances, priorities, and sense of well-being, third parties looking at statistical data see only the artifacts of disparities based on paychecks. Such income disparities between women and men are equaled or exceeded by disparities among women, between those who work full-time and those who work part-time.