Are executive women gaining power at the expense of their health? Or do their high earnings and advanced degrees protect them from unhealthy outcomes?

I surveyed 369 North American professional women, largely drawn from Fortune 500 companies, to get a fuller picture of their health. The women in my sample included a range of incomes and education levels from senior executives to entry-level analysts to executive assistants. As far as I know, it’s the first survey of its kind to look specifically at executive women’s health. My assumption was that most women would generally be healthy and have access to care, but I wondered if long hours, travel, and lack of consistent sleep would take an insidious toll. I analyzed the results using controls for variables like age, marital status, and ethnicity.

My research — which used several established self-reporting instruments, such as the California Women’s Health Survey and the Perceived Stress Questionnaire — found that for executive women, as incomes and education levels increase, several health indicators also increase. (This is in line with other findings, including CDC studies and the research of Sir Michael Marmot, who studied several populations around the world and demonstrated that health and education rise together.) For instance, in my study, the wealthier, more educated women were less likely to be overweight, more likely to get at least six hours of sleep a night, less likely to drink to excess, and less stressed. And 50% of the women in my study reported that their overall health was very good.

But I also found an interesting paradox: when I asked a broad question about their overall health, the more educated, wealthier women reported more days each month that they felt less healthy.

One reason might be that on several measures, even wealthy, educated women struggle to make time for their health. They work long hours — in fact, the more they earn, the more they work. More than 50% of respondents said they log over 50 hours a week in the office and take work home with them as well. The top 5% of earners put in the longest hours, with 50% of those earning over $250,000 working 70+ hours a week. (This puts them in a tiny minority of women: only 14% of American women without children work 50+ hours a week, and only 9% of mothers do, according to 2011 Census data.)

For these women, it’s hard to find time to see a doctor: in my study, 48% said they could not see a doctor due to workload.

Working so much also makes it hard to find time to exercise: 50% exercise two days or fewer per week, and 25% said they had not participated in any physical exercise within the past month.

Even though wealthier women were less likely to be overweight and more likely to get at least some exercise, 41% of all the women in my sample reported being overweight, and 25% said they wanted to lose more than 25 pounds.

Executive women also report high levels of stress: 30% said their change in weight was due to stress, and 26% said they had used medicine for anxiety or sleep problems in past year. In contrast, the National Institute of Medicine reports that only 18% of the general population is affected by anxiety disorders.

I also asked about alcohol use. The results here are slightly mixed. More-educated women were more likely to drink regularly than less-educated women, but less likely to drink to excess. Specifically, the more-educated women were almost twice as likely to say they’d had a drink within the past month, but the less-educated women reported drinking between 2.5 and 3 drinks per occasion of drinking, compared to only 1.5 drinks for more-educated women. Wealthier women were more likely to have had a drink in the past month than lower-income women, but there was no significant difference in the number of drinks they consumed in a sitting. The higher-income women, however, were much more likely to worry about their drinking: women earning a million dollars a year or more were almost four times more likely than women earning $20,000 to $50,000 to say they worried that they drank too much.

How can this be? How can women who report being healthier and less stressed on specific measures feel less healthy overall and worry more about their health?

My study doesn’t tell us, and there could be any number of reasons. For instance, perhaps wealthier, more educated women have higher standards for their health and judge themselves more harshly for falling short of the ideal. Perhaps they have been made more aware of the risks (from higher levels of education) of being sedentary, or of not getting enough sleep, or of drinking too much, and thus are more inclined to feel anxious about how those things affect their general health. Perhaps they have fewer other things to worry about — like how they’re going to pay their utility bills or student loans — and so have more mental energy to devote to health concerns. Perhaps those who choose to pursue more education are more likely have certain personality traits that lead them to be concerned about their health.

Other research has found that working long hours has many negative health effects. Perhaps my survey did not capture all of the ways executive women’s health is being affected by the unusually long hours they are working. More research is needed to tell us why women feel as they do and how the women’s concerns compare with men’s (something I am currently investigating).

But one thing seems clear: no matter how much we earn or how educated we are, lots of us are worried about our health. When I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, I attended a small dinner at which IMF head Christine Lagarde talked about balancing life and work. It didn’t take long for the other powerful, accomplished women in the room to reveal daily lives remarkably similar to those of the hundreds of women who participated in my research. We were all working seven-days-a-week jobs. Some were managing the care of children and elderly parents even while several time zones or oceans away. With such demands on our time, it’s not surprising that so many women put our own well-being last — or that even those of us with lots of resources still have plenty of valid reasons to worry about our health.

Editor’s Note: Due to a labeling error, two charts in this piece were misleading. We have updated the piece with new charts.