Earlier this month, women across the U.S. received one of their many annual reminders of just how much their work is undervalued.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the annual average weekly earnings for women last year was $1,005, or 83.6% of the $1,202 earned by men. That gap is the smallest on record, up from 83% in 2022, but it has barely moved over the last decade. In 2013, women earned 82.1 cents for every dollar that men earned.
Things get a little more interesting, though, if you dig beyond the headline number to a subset where pay disparity has historically been even more gaping: the top earners. Among college graduates with advanced degrees, the highest-earning women brought in 72.8% of the average made by their male counterparts. That’s more than 10 percentage points lower than the average of the broader group.
There are a lot of theories, many of them hard to pull apart, about why the gap for top earners has always been so vast — the types of jobs men and women choose, the industries they work in, sexism and gender bias. But one of the most compelling, and revelatory, is the concept of overwork in the way the U.S. business world is structured.
The dictum in corporate America is that the higher up the ladder you go, the more time you are expected to dedicate to your work. The upside is that you’ll get paid disproportionately more for those extra hours. Claudia Goldin, the Nobel laureate economist at Harvard University whose work has focused on women and the labor force, has called these kinds of jobs “greedy work” — the most time-intensive, demanding and least flexible but also the most lucrative.
The other big distinguishing factor of greedy work is that it’s dominated by men. Women with children simply don’t have enough time to give to these kinds of jobs (think law, finance and consulting); instead, they’re spending those hours on child care. Rather than take a job that requires they travel at a moment’s notice or regularly work nights and weekends, even the highest-earning women get diverted into jobs that don’t require as many hours. The trade-off is, of course, a lower paycheck.
Overwork is such a big contributing factor that a paper published a decade ago in the American Sociological Review had already found that over a 30-year period, overwork exacerbated the gender wage gap by 10%. It essentially erased any gains that may have come from the increase in women’s education. The authors neatly lay out the stakes:
“Overwork rests on a social foundation that is itself highly gendered: employees who work long hours can only do so with the support of other household members, usually women, who shoulder the lion’s share of unpaid-work obligations. Under this system, women are less likely than men to be able to work long hours or to enjoy the rising wage payoff to long hours. The emergence of long work hours as part of the ‘new normal’ in some occupations … builds on and perpetuates old forms of gender inequality.”
Over the last decade, the gender pay gap for the highest earners has bounced around, but last year something striking happened. While the overall gender wage gap closed by only 0.6 percentage points, for the highest earners it narrowed by 6.7 percentage points, jumping up from 66.1% in 2022 to 72.8% in 2023.
Countless factors are likely at play here, but there are hints that one of them could very well be employees’ changing relationship with overwork. Last year, I wrote about a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that found that between 2019 and 2022, the highest-earning men who spent the most time on their jobs reduced their hours more than any other group.
The data doesn’t necessarily suggest that this cohort suddenly shifted those hours to child care, freeing up women to spend more time on greedy work. But as I wrote at the time, it does help “redefine and reset expectations about what the ideal employee should look like to one who is less linked to overwork. If outrageous hours are no longer tacitly embedded in a job description, women might be enticed to take on more demanding (and high-paying) jobs.” While the gap still persists, the newly released data is an indication that just might be starting to happen.
