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All the highest-paying sectors are male dominated, and the fact that women are more likely to be schoolteachers than computer scientists does explain a substantial part of the gender gap. Still, women's greater inclination to enroll in nursing school rather than in engineering, which has long been true, is not the whole story. Instead, it's helpful to consider why the disparities between men's and women's occupational choices increased just as the wage disparities skyrocketed. For example, we were surprised to learn that the percentage of female teachers has been increasing since the 1980s and reached 77 percent in 2018 (the same percentage as a century ago). In the early nineties, teachers' salaries started to fall behind those of other workers with comparable education and skills. It didn't take long before the men left the field. We were also surprised to discover that the percentage of women in computer science peaked in the early eighties, then fell during tech's incredible boom years. In finance, women won hard-fought gains through the nineties and increased their percentage of MBAs up to a quarter of the total by 2000, only to see their representation on Wall Street fall just as Wall Street salaries began to soar. And for those women who stuck it out, the gender gaps in wages stayed high; six of the top seven categories with the largest disparities in what men and women are paid involve finance, and the largest entry-level pay gaps are in tech. It turns out that the parts of the economy that most pride themselves on being a meritocracy have starker differences between men and women than anywhere else.

We came to realize that something more than women's initial choices are at play. After all, women's representation in the high-powered Fortune 500 CEO positions remains at a miniscule number—just over 10 percent—despite the fact that women's numbers have risen steadily to 48 percent of entry-level management candidates. In our field, where women often constitute half our law school classes, and where they start out getting paid only slightly less than men, they are vastly underrepresented in the most highly paid law firm positions. In 2005, 8 percent of law firms reported that their highest-paid attorney was a woman. In 2023, that number fell: only 2 percent of law firms said that their highest-paid attorney was a woman. While the percentage of women in such positions grew over the last fifteen years (16 percent in 2006, up to 22 percent in 2020), the larger percentage of women making it into the top legal ranks did nothing to offset the increasing gap in salaries. Since the recovery from the financial crisis, women have been making modest gains, but that's not the point. In male-dominated occupations where men earn the most, women are at a disadvantage. The female-dominated occupations have lost ground to the male-dominated occupations. And many are being forced out altogether: women like Vandermeyden who enter tech are twice as likely to leave as their male counterparts. The different occupational choices theory does not explain why.

That led to a third explanation: women's failure "to lean in," to take risks, to do what it takes to succeed. Almost everywhere we looked, however, and in almost every story we will tell in this book, we saw stories like Vandermeyden's. Women who did lean in—by working long hours, questioning their bosses, insisting on raises, or objecting to sexual harassment—found that leaning in might mean getting booted out. The more prosaic stories involve the women who found they did not get the same raises as the men and complained; retaliation often followed. The more striking examples come from industries like finance, where the ability to break legal or ethical rules and get away with it can be handsomely rewarded. Women are substantially less likely than men to engage in financial misconduct, and they cause their employers smaller dollar losses when they do. Yet, they are also substantially more likely to be fired for misconduct and substantially less likely to be rehired. Leaning in takes a number of different forms, and many prove disastrous for women workers.

The "lean in" thesis also overlooks some of the women who are most likely to stand up for themselves. Today, the biggest beneficiaries of the union movement are women, especially women of color and those from other underrepresented groups. Unions have "leaned in," standing up for their workers' rights, producing smaller gender disparities than other workplaces, and winning benefits such as health insurance; 72 percent of Black women union members have health insurance in contrast with less than 50 percent of nonunion Black women workers. Women in nonunion workplaces, on the other hand, not only earn less than union members but also have less control over their working conditions. Yet, the war against unions has taken its toll, and there are fewer union jobs available than there once were, despite the renewed energy that has gone into organizing teachers, Walmart employees, and other workers stuck in low-wage jobs that remain disproportionately female. Throughout the economy, those who lean in, especially on behalf of marginalized workers, become targets. The story of unions is a prime example of the threats, intimidation, and legal changes that suppress collective activities.

All this suggests that the most conventional explanations of all—misogyny, discrimination, and sexual harassment—do provide part of the explanation. Feminist scholars document the catcalls, mansplaining, insults, and harassment (sexual and otherwise) that continue to demean many working women. Outright misogyny has increased online and in the political sphere. Still, we found virtually no evidence that these factors explain the changing employment picture since the nineties. Indeed, women are no longer excluded from workplaces on a wholesale basis. Some CEOs have lost their jobs because of inappropriate sexual behavior, and courts are holding companies themselves liable for failing to investigate claims of sexual harassment. These successes, no matter how scattered, are positive signs.