Why Women Choose Differently at Work

If you were to predict the future on the basis of school achievement alone, the world would be a matriarchy.”

Susan Pinker, who wrote that sentence almost a decade ago in her book The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women, and the Real Gender Gap, could make the same claim today: A 2014 meta-analysis found that the “female advantage in school marks has remained stable in the data retrieved (from 1914 to 2011).”¹ Given that there’s an overall female advantage in school—one largest in language courses, smallest in math courses, according to the paper—why isn’t there a corresponding advantage, in terms of pay and high-powered positions, for females later, at work?

The developmental psychologist’s answer hasn’t changed since she wrote : The female advantage at school doesn’t translate to work partly because of the different career and lifestyle preferences men and women go on to develop, ones that aren’t entirely culturally determined. These preferences, Pinker says, are a key part of the story about why women and men follow different career trajectories and schedules. Out-and-out discrimination, she argues, is still a problem and a significant part of the story—just not the whole story. For this, called Pinker’s book a, meanwhile, found the book interesting (“much food for thought”) but its case unconvincing (“more journalistic than scientific”).