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“Boosting,” she explained, is shoplifting and selling the swag. “Roosting” means serving as a lookout for the local street gang that sells drugs. She gets $8 for a boy’s haircut and $12 for a man’s.

Which job is the worst of the four?

“Turning tricks,” she says, with no hesitation.

Why?

“’Cause I don’t really like men. I guess it bothers me mentally.”

And what if prostitution paid twice as much?

“Would I do it more?” she asks. “Yeah!”

Throughout history, it has invariably been easier to be male than female. Yes, this is an overgeneralization and yes, there are exceptions, but by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men. Even though men handled most of the warfare, hunting, and brute-force labor, women had a shorter life expectancy. Some deaths were more senseless than others. Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as 1 million European women, most of them poor and many of them widowed, were executed for witchcraft, taking the blame for bad weather that killed crops.

Women have finally overtaken men in life expectancy, thanks mainly to medical improvements surrounding childbirth. In many countries, however, being female remains a serious handicap even in the twenty-first century. Young women in Cameroon have their breasts “ironed”—beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell—to make them less sexually tempting. In China, foot binding has finally been done away with (after roughly one thousand years), but females are still far more likely than males to be abandoned after birth, to be illiterate, and to commit suicide. And women in rural India, as we wrote earlier, continue to face discrimination in just about every direction.

But especially in the world’s developed nations, women’s lives have improved dramatically. There is no comparing the prospects of a girl in twenty-first-century America or Britain or Japan with her counterpart from a century or two earlier. In any arena you look—education, legal and voting rights, career opportunities, and so on—it is far better to be a woman today than at any other point in history. In 1872, the earliest year for which such statistics are available, 21 percent of college students in the United States were female. Today, that number is 58 percent and rising. It has truly been a stunning ascendancy.

And yet there is still a considerable economic price to pay for being a woman. For American women twenty-five and older who hold at least a bachelor’s degree and work full-time, the national median income is about $47,000. Similar men, meanwhile, make more than $66,000, a premium of 40 percent. The same is true even for women who attend the nation’s elite universities. The economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that women who went to Harvard earned less than half as much as the average Harvard man. Even when the analysis included only full-time, full-year employees and controlled for college major, profession, and other variables, Goldin and Katz found that the Harvard women still earned about 30 percent less than their male counterparts.

What can possibly account for such a huge wage gap?

There are a variety of factors. Women are more likely to leave the workforce or downshift their careers to raise a family. Even within high-paying occupations like medicine and law, women tend to choose specialties that pay less (general practitioner, for instance, or in-house counsel). And there is likely still a good amount of discrimination. This may range from the overt—denying a woman a promotion purely because she is not a man—to the insidious. A considerable body of research has shown that overweight women suffer a greater wage penalty than overweight men. The same is true for women with bad teeth.

There are some biological wild cards as well. The economists Andrea Ichino and Enrico Moretti, analyzing personnel data from a large Italian bank, found that female employees under forty-five years old tended