On Dec. 10, 2013, General Motors named Mary Barra its new chief executive, making her the first woman to lead a major carmaker. Young women are achieving and earning more than ever before, but they continue to face workplace bias, particularly if they become mothers. Larry W. Smith/EPA

Women are outpacing men in education and have been for two decades. They outnumber men on college campuses. They earn more undergraduate degrees. They earn more master’s degrees. They earn more doctoral degrees. For every 100 men who graduate with a college degree this year, 140 women will do the same. Yet women still make less money and advance in the workplace less often. They are more likely to leave their jobs, especially after having kids. As they age, they face an increased risk of poverty and economic instability. A new Pew study shows that millennial women (for the purposes of the study, women ages 18 to 32) now make almost as much money as their male peers — a victory insofar as the pay gap is narrower than ever before but disturbing when you consider that even higher educational attainment is not resulting in parity. Women have earned nearly 10 million more college degrees than men over the past two decades, but their average wages remain lower. The shrinking pay gap, too, is not just because women are making more money than they were two decades ago (although they are); it is also because men — and in particular, millennial men — are making less. The near parity in pay between young men and women disappears as soon as women have children. Kids hamper mom’s earning potential while increasing dad’s. Mothers suffer a wage penalty of about 5 percent per child — and not because mothers work fewer hours or are less committed employees. Rather, it is the very status of being a mother that leads to negative judgments. In one study (PDF), visibly pregnant employees were perceived as “less committed to their jobs, less dependable and less authoritative but warmer, more emotional and more irrational.” Another study (PDF) demonstrated that a female consultant with kids was evaluated as less competent than a female consultant without children. And then there is the other, perhaps more surprising finding that millennial women do not aspire to the same level of success as their male peers do. Among millennials, 34 percent of women say they have no interest in being the boss someday, compared with 24 percent of men. The reasons behind that ambition gap are no doubt complex, but they likely come down to some combination of 1) men’s being raised with an assumption of authority and an emphasis on leadership as achievement and 2) young women looking at the gender landscape ahead of them and deciding, rationally, that aiming too high would result only in disappointment.

Female bosses, still rare

The roots of these differences are both social and political. The biggest impediments to workplace equality — and the easiest ones to solve — require simple legislation. It is a familiar list: adequate paid parental leave, paid sick days, paid vacation, universal health care, a livable minimum wage and state-subsidized, high-quality day care. Those legislative fixes would not simply help women achieve workplace parity; they would help promote a saner balance between work and life, something men report concern about too. More challenging are the cultural and internal barriers that are less apparent in our day-to-day lives. Women are less likely to ask their bosses for a raise. Even if they do, a boss’s response can often be informed by the societal perception of mothers as distracted or less committed in the office than their male peers. The difficulty is in the invisibility. A boss does not have to be a sexist pig to hold unrecognized biases against women. Women who are not promoted usually have no way to know if the boss would have acted differently if the promotion seeker had been a man. After all, there is always a series of reasons to justify hiring or promoting one individual over another. In one study of lab-assistant hires, those doing the hiring favored applications from men over otherwise identical applications from women. They rated the applicants with male names as more competent and hirable, offered them jobs more often and gave them higher starting salaries. And they always had a gender-neutral reason — this academic achievement, that research experience. The presumption of male competence and authority runs deep. It attaches itself as soon as we see a male name on a resume, an email or a byline. Because it is so pervasive and tends to crop up in circumstances where many other factors are at play, it is difficult to isolate. The dynamic is hard to see as it happens; the consequences are not.

A woman heavily involved in the care of her kids is fulfilling her duty. A man who is heavily involved in the care of his kids is a hero.

Women today hold just 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions. In the Fortune 1,000, 4.5 percent of CEOs are women. Last month GM hired Mary Barra to head the company, which was good news. But it was news precisely because no woman had ever run an international automobile company before — and because female CEOs are so rare. I have little doubt that Barra, like other prominent and successful woman before her, will be subject to extensive media critiques of her feminism, her work-life balance, her obligations on behalf of all womankind and her inevitable failure to be everything to every woman (see: Sheryl Sandberg, Michelle Obama, Beyonce). Despite such scrutiny, such women do make a difference. It would be foolish to think that a couple of high-profile hires will fix workplace inequities overnight. The power in having women in corporate leadership roles is not that they are able to swoop in and turn the workplace into a feminist dream. It is, rather, that each of them inches us toward a normalization of female power. Each of them gets us a little more accustomed to seeing female bosses. Each of them gives the others a little more breathing room, a little less weight on her back from shouldering so many expectations. And that proliferation, slowly but surely, is what will quietly shift our internal biases and assumptions about women at all levels of employment.

Pushing past pink-collar