While the gender wage gap is particularly large for graduates of Ivy League schools, this trend extends beyond them. The more education you have—the more money you make—the wider the wage gap.

Let’s take two of the industries with the widest gender wage gaps as examples: finance and management consulting. These sectors, taken together, employ the largest group of Ivy League graduates: 46 percent of University of Pennsylvania students, 38 percent of Columbia students, 39 percent of Cornell students, and between 23 and 34 percent of students at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Brown. Every fall, swarms of representatives from top investment banks and consulting firms come to Ivy League campuses to recruit seniors, ultimately selecting a new “class” of employees that hails almost exclusively from Ivies and other elite schools. By and large, these students make more money than anyone else in their graduating class, earning between $60,000 and $110,000 in their first year.

A survey of Harvard graduates in the Class of 2014 shows that, while approximately the same number of women and men work in consulting (14 percent), substantially more men work in finance. Twenty-four percent of Harvard men, and only 10 percent of Harvard women, chose to pursue finance careers after graduation.

“We know there is a gender imbalance in employment at some of the occupations at the very top of the income distribution,” said John Friedman, a Professor of Economics at Brown and one of the co-authors of the Equality of Opportunity study. “Most colleges—non-selective four year schools, and even most selective four-year schools—aren’t putting too many people into the Goldman Sachs of the world.”

Finance is a field with a particularly low number of women; many of the other highest-paying industries don’t have that same gender imbalance. So why aren’t those women financially benefitting from jobs in high-paying fields as much as their male classmates?

Goldin and Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard, offered a helpful, if somewhat limited, explanation in their study on MBA graduates from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, almost all of whom graduated into corporate or financial sectors. They found that, nine years after graduation, Booth School women made 37.5 percent less than Booth School men.

By the time these women were 34—the age used in the Equality of Opportunity study—two things had happened. First, Goldin said in an interview, many women had attached themselves to a romantic partner. As careers developed, the woman was usually the one expected to be flexible, and move to accommodate her partner’s career. Even more importantly, people had started to have kids. And, again, more often than not, the woman was the one forced to adjust.

“These are jobs where you can’t really reduce your hours,” Goldin said. “When clients say they want you at 2 in the morning, you have to be there. So when a woman has a kid, rather than reducing her hours, she leaves, or moves somewhere else—to an NGO or a smaller firm.”