Why Women Do Better In School and Still Make Less than Men Do

There are of course many answers to the question of why females have been outperforming men all the way through their educational careers, straight through to graduate or law school, then end up making less money.  But I've just learned of a new one.

It's long been clear that men benefit from a variety of sexist traditions at work, including: an over-valuation of occupations dominated by men; assumptions that men are supporting families and therefore should earn more than women; and work cultures that are simply more critical of and hostile to women.  At the top of the occupational ladder, highly educated women are more likely than their male peers to work part time or not at all because they are more likely to want to spend time with their children--and to recognize that their highly ambitious husbands are not likely to cut back much on their 80-hour work weeks to share that responsibility.

But  a recent Atlantic review of Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, passes along some gender differences that I was not aware of, namely that once high-performing women leave college they are, on average, much less assertive than the male counterparts they have just finished pulverising in the classroom.  Men are much more likely to demand raises and to shoot for higher positions.  In sum, male employees tend to be more confident than female ones--though they would seem to have less reason to be.  And this confidence is often rewarded.