But among the hardest-working journalists are party and society reporters, mostly women, who are constantly running to one late-night event after another. Fashion critics spend weeks at shows in Europe. And education reporters must cover late meetings. “My hours were horrible,” remembers Priscilla Painton, now the executive editor for nonfiction at Simon & Schuster (where she is my book editor), who covered the school board as a metro reporter early in her career. Conversely, some plum posts — magazine writer, op-ed columnist — permit a lot of flexibility. If this were all about schedule-related “choice,” why wouldn’t women dominate those jobs?

Because the closer you get to money and power, the more the writers look like the people they are covering. Vestiges remain of the culture evoked by Lynn Povich in “The Good Girls Revolt,” her terrific book about the sex discrimination suits filed in the 1970s at Newsweek and elsewhere.

When I came to Washington, some of the toughest places for women to get hired into were the prestigious publications like The Washington Monthly and The New Republic. According to VIDA, an organization that runs an annual tally of women’s representation in print, in 2013 men still dominated bylines in The New Republic by about three to one, and they outnumbered women at The Nation, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, too. Just a few months ago, the Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks (a colleague of mine at the New America Foundation) was the only female columnist out of more than 20 regular contributors to Foreign Policy. The editors have made an effort to recruit talented women, and the magazine now has 11 female contributors. Still, says Ms. Brooks, she regularly runs into TV hosts who say, “I would invite more women onto my show — if only there were any who were qualified!”

It’s all too easy to imagine hearing much the same in boardrooms and venture-capital firms as media moves in a digital direction. As the Reuters columnist — and my former boss — Jack Shafer has pointed out, major exponents of the new online brand journalism seem to be mostly male. Mr. Shafer calls them “marquee brothers”: journalists like Ezra Klein, Nate Silver and Glenn Greenwald, who land much-talked-about deals with deep-pocketed investors to run their own ventures. It can’t be a coincidence that just two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal unveiled an all-male roster of speakers at a tech conference.

Yes, there are women leading or coleading some of these journalism start-ups — Laura Poitras at the Intercept, Melissa Bell at Vox, Kara Swisher at Re/code — but they’re not nearly as often the story. The rise of tech in media is playing as very much a guy thing.

As journalism expands beyond institutional newsrooms, deals are more easily made out of sight. The same is true in science, where women are far less likely than men to be invited to join lucrative corporate scientific advisory boards. Doors can open. But new kinds of doors can be closed.