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The result: European countries aren’t having skill-shortage complaints at the same level as in the U.S., and the nations that have the most established apprenticeship programs—the Scandinavian nations, Germany and Switzerland—have low unemployment.

even though the gap narrows when you control for these factors, it is still large when you look at a subset of the careers PayScale examined: the high earners. In jobs that pay more than $100,000, women earn just 87 percent of what men receive, even after adjusting for outside factors. You can see this in the second chart above — around the $100,000 mark, many more dots start to fall beneath the equal-wage line.

After controlling for outside factors, some of the biggest gender pay gaps are in jobs like chief executive (in which, after PayScale adjusted the data, women earn 71 percent of what men earn), hospital administrator (women earn 77 percent of what equally qualified men earn) and chief operating officer (women earn 80 percent of what equally qualified men earn).

In each of these jobs, performance quality is a relatively subjective measure. Compare those jobs to positions like engineers, actuaries or electricians, where the criteria for a job well done might be relatively more concrete or measurable — and where the salaries earned by men and women are roughly equal.

According to a new study by sociologists from Indiana University and Cornell University, one of the biggest contributing factors to the wage gap is the phenomenon of “overworking” – which means working 50 hours a week or more.

The study, using data collected by the US Census Bureau, found the relative hourly wage of overworkers compared with that of full-time workers had increased substantially over the past three decades, but because a greater percentage of male workers were overworking, this change benefited men much more than women. Today, women earn an estimated 81 per cent of what men are paid.

According to Youngjoo Cha, a sociologist at Indiana University who contributed to the study, even women who are employed full-time typically have more family obligations than men, which limit their capacity for putting in gruelling hours at the office.

In the so-called greedy occupations – doctors, lawyers and upper-level managers, for instance – workers are evaluated based on their face time at the office, according to Cha, who specialises in gender and labour markets. It is no coincidence that these jobs tend to come with the fattest pay cheques, too.

“In our culture, ideal workers are those who put in long hours and completely devote their time and emotions to their jobs,” she says. “In these top-end occupations, this phenomenon is most pronounced. Workers are bound by stronger norms, and if they don’t live up to those norms, they are penalised. Lawyers who don’t bill enough hours, for example, don’t progress and don’t make partner.”