Well, I'm a historian as well as a lawyer, and so I've looked back more than 50 years, a couple centuries, and this is such an unprecedented time in history where, for the first time, you have 50 percent of the graduate students and professional students are women. This is just a different face on the whole nation, both at work and in the educational system, and at home, as well. Part of the issue with the pay gap, which is persistent, it's still 77 percent, is what goes on in education from the lowest levels through the highest levels.
One of the major things that's going on is that we still have very segregated education. On the Berkeley campus, we have the north side and the south side. On the north side, we have all the guys--engineering, maths. On the south side, we have education, psychology, social work, the humanities. They're all there at the same university. They're counted as 50-50 in terms of the number of undergraduate students, but when they walk out the door, the north side folks are going to be earning at least twice as much as the south side folks, and will continue to do so. And these are the professions that women have chosen for the last 100 years--the helping professions--and they're still there. There are not enough of them going over to the science side.
For those who do go over to the science side, you find a second phenomena occurring. These women are all at the age of childbearing; they're between the ages of 30 and 40, and they won't finish their PhDs until in their mid-30s, and the post-docs, they'll probably be even later than that. They can't expect to get tenure before 40. So these are the years in which they are having families, if they are having families, and they're finding that there's no family accommodation to support them. There's no child birth leave at all for most graduate students, no recognition of the fact that they are in the family period of their life. And because of this, 37 percent of married women with children drop out of the scientific pipeline and do not go on for the academic research career. And of those that do go on, 27 percent of married women with children do not finish up to the point of getting tenure.
So, both of those issues--the segregation of education into the mens' doing technical more higher paying positions, ultimately, and the fact that we don't give the family support to those who are students, much less when they get into the workplace, have really put women into an institutional second position until we change the institutions. Both starting with the educational institutions, and then going out to the workplace.