When a Promotion Leads to Divorce

For the ninth time in the past 10 years, no women have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. The critically acclaimed adaptation of Little Women earned a nod for Best Picture. But the Oscars overlooked its director, Greta Gerwig, whose previous film, Lady Bird, earned the only Best Director entry for a woman out of the past 50 nominations in this category.

The Academy’s slight is part of a larger phenomenon. In the past half century, women in the U.S. have caught up with men in college degrees and . But this “grand gender convergence,” as the economist Claudia Goldin has called it, has failed to produce equality in media, corporate, or political leadership. Women account for less than 30 percent of today’s senators and representatives, less than 10 percent of 500 chief executives, and