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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

"High-achieving" is used loosely here. If you define "high achieving" as CEO's and hedge fund managers, there are way more men in that group, but if you define it as "college educated desk-job professional" then at least within the 22-35 cohort, there are more women or it is rapidly becoming the case that there are more women. The graduation ratio for college is almost 60 women for every 40 men these days.

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My understanding is that men in that age cohort earn more at all income brackets. The apparent measure of status used by the writers seems delusionally fixated on credentials. It's just interesting this is never remarked upon in the many, many articles alleging large numbers of "accomplished" women out there with no male peers. Accomplished at what? Third tier graduate education and a $70K office job?

An individual man may earn more than an individual woman, but in broad strokes, with more women graduating college than men, you're going to see more of them in "professional" jobs, especially in younger cohorts.

Credentials are an imperfect, but reasonable, proxy for career trajectory; if you have two big groups of people, and one has a lot more degrees than the other, you'd expect that group to be more successful over the course of their careers.

One thing to consider is that it appears that we already have more graduates than professional careers. If we assume that all college graduate men and women are perfectly equal in the workplace, then the larger group of women will be more likely to find themselves without a professional career due to lack of opportunity, and thus will have a lower average income.

A lot of people are extremely touchy about their third-tier M.A.s, including probably a lot of the people who write these kinds of articles.

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