Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama were particularly sympathetic figures on the campaign trail.  Their lives exemplify the dilemmas faced by women who are highly qualified, but choose, at least temporarily, to give priority to maternal and wifely responsibilities.  There are a ton of professional women out there who understand how difficult it is to come through on both the career and family fronts.

The fact is pressures on women are ramping up.

It’s as though the goal post just shifted. Over the last decade, high level, high impact jobs in our economy have become much more stressful and strenuous—and much more rewarding. Propelled by globalization, canny communication technology and gargantuan compensation packages, a new work model has emerged which requires professionals to give huge amounts of their hearts and brains to the job. One problem with this increasingly “extreme” work model: women are being excluded in new ways.

Here’s the story. Over the last 40 years, highly credentialed women have flooded into the professional labor market. In at least some sectors they started to make serious progress, rising up the ranks, snapping at the heels of men. Then what happened? High level, high impact jobs got redefined so as to become even more time consuming, even more pressurizing. Indeed they have become so vast in scope that they are now undoable by individuals who cannot conjure up a 60-80 hour workweek on a steady basis. These top jobs increasingly exclude women who have serious family responsibilities—about two-thirds of the highly qualified female labor pool.

So what is an extreme job? As I wrote in my book “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps” (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), these jobs are not just about hours worked. Respondents are considered to have extreme jobs if they work 60 hours or more per week and deal with at least five additional performance pressures. Top picks are 24/7 client demands, P&L responsibility and significant amounts of travel.

Using this complex definition, these data tell us that a great many well-paid, high level jobs these days are “extreme.” Across sector, 21% of high echelon workers have extreme jobs and in large global corporations this figure rises to 45%. Extreme jobs are no longer limited to Wall Street or the City. These jobs are spreading and are now all over the economy, in manufacturing and the media as well as in accounting and the law. They are prevalent on a global scale and are held by 55-year-olds as well as 35-year olds.

As one would expect, these jobs exact a toll. The data show that the extreme work model is wrecking havoc in private lives—taking a toll on health, gutting relationships, sideswiping sex lives and emptying out parental roles. Much of this fall out has particular significance for women.

More so than men, women are closely tuned into—and pained by—negative fallout on their children. More than half of mothers with extreme jobs see a close connection between their job pressures and a range of troubling problems with their children. Whether it’s eating too much junk food or underachieving at school, many working moms feel directly responsible. As Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain will attest, it’s virtually impossible to deal with extreme jobs, and the rigors of being a high profile mother.  One interesting finding: the research literature shows that it’s rare for parents to admit to problems with their own children—there are serious problems in society, but never in one’s own home. The data is startling, a veritable “portrait of guilt.”

All of which helps explain why rather few women elect into extreme jobs in the first place (only 20% of extreme job workers are female), and of these, many find their jobs unsustainable. Fully 80% of women in extreme jobs have one foot out the door—they do not want to work this hard, under this kind of pressure, for more than 12 months. The figure for men is 58%.

The new extreme work model does not augur well for women’s progress. Many organizations and corporations see these high octane extreme workers as the “A” team—the bench strength from which they recruit future leaders. Some have started to develop programs to make sure that the “A” team stays.

American Express surveyed the company in search of “pockets of extremity” and from that survey developed the Project Resource Team Program. The PRT allows employees to undertake assignments on a project basis and work wherever and however they want for the length of that project. It is a powerful way to allow women to tailor work to their own needs and work smarter.

Written for w2wlink.com, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett.