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Many women professionals traverse settings beyond the office in their work, but research on women professionals rarely follows them out of the office. Using a large, archived data set of focus groups with sales professionals, the authors ask how work in out-of-the-office settings affects women's careers. The authors distinguish between two types of settings. In "heterosocial" settings, interaction rules are traditionally and normatively gendered; women and men are understood by others as heterosexually linked pairs, women (and men) become targets of gossip, and some women report sexual advances and sexual harassment. In "homosocial" settings such as golf courses and strip clubs, women's disadvantage takes the form of exclusion. D uring the past 30 years, women have made substantial inroads into previously men's fields (Morgan 2005). However, case studies of single professions or organizations present a mixed picture, with some showing gains for women (Morgan 1998; Petersen and Saporta 2004) and others showing women continuing to lag behind similar men (Morgan and Arthur 2005; Noonan, Corcoran, and Courant forthcoming). Critiquing Acker's (1990) "gendered organizations" approach, Britton (2000) argues for research explaining why women's progress (pay, promotion) is better in some organizations or professions than in others. Britton writes, "Conceptualizing bureaucratic organizations as inherently gendered may keep us from seeing settings in which gender is less salient and can thus obscure 108 AUTHORS' NOTE: The authors thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

I use data from the 1993 National Survey of College Graduates and appended 1990 Census on about 11,000 men and women college graduates (8400 with bachelor's degrees only, and 2800 with graduate degrees) who earned degrees in a 5‐year period (1984–1988), to address questions regarding the link between college major and early‐career gender pay differentials. I look at within‐major gender pay differentials for two groups of college graduates: those whose highest degrees are bachelor's and those who hold graduate degrees. Among those whose highest degrees are bachelor's, I find that within‐major gender pay penalties are virtually zero for professional majors. Gender pay penalties are large for general studies majors: social sciences, history, and humanities, and business administration (except accounting). For these, jobs account for a large portion of the unexplained gap. Among individuals who hold graduate degrees, I find that within‐major gender pay penalties are zero for all fields. My findings suggest that pay penalties to women in the aggregate can be traced to relatively large penalties in a couple of key fields (bachelor's degree–level general studies fields): social sciences and humanities, and business administration (except accounting). These findings are important, as they contradict the prevailing view. Existing empirical research suggests that women are uniformly disadvantaged compared to men regardless of field of study and, thus, field of study explains little or none of the gender gap in pay. I conclude that supply‐side mechanisms are important factors in producing gender inequality among college graduates, and suggest that we further focus our attention on the “supply side” in understanding segregation and gender pay inequality.

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