In opposite-sex marriages in which women earned more, women said, on average, that they earned 1.5 percentage points less than they actually did. Their husbands said they earned 2.9 percentage points more than they did. The census researchers, Marta Murray-Close and Misty L. Heggeness, concluded that people thought it was more socially desirable for men to earn more — so whether fudging the numbers was a conscious or unconscious choice, these social norms affected their answers. They called it “manning up and womaning down.”

Obstacles for female executives aren’t just because of their individual choices. There are larger forces at work, experts say, rooted in biases against women in power, mothers who work or leaders who don’t fit the mold of the people who led before them. Researchers and recruiters say that real change will only come from addressing bias at a more fundamental level, which requires a fundamental change in the way we think about leadership.

Denise M. Morrison, weaned on assurances from her father that the future would someday be led by women, yearned for the executive suite years before she occupied it. When she finally reached the top, at Campbell Soup Company in August 2011, she had few female peers in the upper ranks of the largest companies in the United States. Reflecting on her career in an interview with The New York Times last month, Ms. Morrison said she had “wanted to break the glass ceiling,” regardless of the obstacles. “It wasn’t only about me,” she added. “It was about the next generation of women coming behind me.”

Women married to men — even when they work and earn as much as or more than their husbands — still do more domestic work, and social scientists have found that the duties are gendered. Feminine chores are mainly indoor and done frequently: cooking, cleaning, laundry and child care. Masculine chores are mostly outdoor and less frequent: taking out the trash, mowing the lawn or washing the car. Dozens of studies of gay and lesbian couples have found that they divide unpaid labor in a more egalitarian way. They don’t have traditional gender roles to fall back on, and they tend to be more committed to equality.

Salary history bans can also have a less expected effect: When employers don’t rely on past pay as a proxy for how valuable someone is, they might consider a wider variety of candidates. A recent working paper was based on an experiment in an online job marketplace: Half of employers could see applicants’ past pay and half could not. The employers who could not see past pay viewed more applications, asked candidates more questions and invited more for interviews. The candidates they hired had, on average, lower past wages, and struck better deals when they negotiated.

The prevalence of men in power with particular names is revealing not only of skewed gender representation, but also of the whiteness of many institutions of American politics, culture and education. White men continue to dominate many categories of leadership in America, as our Times colleagues showed in an analysis in 2016.

The issue, in general, comes down to time. Children require a lot of it, especially in the years before they start school, and mothers spend disproportionately more time than fathers on child care and related responsibilities. This seems to be particularly problematic for women building their careers, when they might have to work hardest and prove themselves most, and less so for women who have already established some seniority or who have not yet started careers. EDITORS’ PICKS Baffled by Bitcoin? How Cryptocurrency Works ‘It Has to Be Perfect’: Putting Out a Yearbook After the Parkland Shooting What’s It Like to Visit Wakanda? You Had

In general, Americans — especially men — have been more likely to say they want a child of their own gender. In the 2011 Gallup survey, 31 percent of women wanted a boy and 33 percent a girl, while 49 percent of men wanted a boy and 22 percent a girl. Part of the reason is parents want to share interests and hobbies with a child, research shows, and think this will be based on gender. Now that girls play sports and do other things that used to be considered masculine, fathers might feel more of an affinity for them. Stereotypes about what boys spend their time doing have not changed as much.

Despite generous social policies, women who work full-time there are still paid 15 percent to 20 percent less than men, new research shows — a gender pay gap similar to that in the United States. The main reason for this pay gap seems to be the same in both places: Children hurt mothers’ careers. This is, in large part, because women spend more time on child rearing than men do, whether by choice or not.

The nurses also knew they didn’t fit in the traditional mold of masculinity. Many said they were troubled by past recruitment campaigns that played up the masculine aspects of nursing, like one that compared the adrenaline rush to mountain climbing. Instead, they said they embraced the notion that being caring should be considered a masculine trait, too.

“When my wife told her grandfather that I graduated from nursing school, he just laughed. But I think there are more men who are less afraid to take on what have traditionally been considered feminine roles.”