You might find this puzzling and a bit infuriating, but here it goes: Career women are born of privilege, not necessity. What allows women to pursue and stick with careers is their high social-economic status. It’s women who don’t really need jobs—those born into comfortable circumstance who don’t have to be the primary breadwinner—that have the best shot at success.

That’s more or less the finding of a new study about women’s career paths that analyzed data about Baby Boomer women collected from 1982 to 2010. Sociology professors Sarah Damaske of Penn State and Adrianne Frech of the University of Akron write in Harvard Business Review about their study:

Why do some women work steadily while others do not? Surprisingly, we found that women with the greatest financial needs – those who experienced poverty when they were young, were unmarried and lacked access to a second income, or were less educated – appeared to face the greatest barriers to continuous full-time work. . . Women who worked “like men” – that is, full-time for the majority of the years we examined — were more advantaged both during their childhood and throughout young adulthood relative to their peers.