What being a high-level executive requires...
A whole lot of time in the office it would seem, and that also seems to apply to working at startups:
A study conducted by The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs, found that the average CEO works 58 hours per week. Fortune 500 CEOs likely work even more.
Unlike in typical media portrayals, few male senior executives spend much time hang-gliding. In the real world, here’s how it more often plays out, as reported to me by my many clients who are male senior executives. Their exercise is more likely to be on a treadmill while doing professional reading. If he’s married, when wife urges him to do more of the domestic chores and parenting, he is likely to say something like, “I want to rise to the top and you want me to, too. I like my work and you like our lifestyle. That requires lots of evenings and weekends. I spend as much time with the family as I can.”
Most women make different choices. ... a majority even of Ivy- and Stanford-educated female alumni did not work full time. Harvard Business School reports that only 38% of its female MBA graduates, during their childbearing years, work full-time.
Can a woman work such hours? See this bit about Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's new CEO:
When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk. "For my first five years at Google, I pulled an all-nighter every week," Mayer said in a recent talk at New York's 92Y cultural center. "It was a lot of hard work."
The answer to that particular question appears to be yes (and it should be noted that benefits that Google provides to its employees include free prepared meals, laundry service, and door-to-door transportation to get to and from home. 130 hours per week basically means that you have no time whatsoever to do anything other than eat and sleep, and that's not even enough hours of sleep for the average person.
Women certainly seem to be able to work crazy hours but there's still the related question of just what fraction of women WANT to do that. Remember that women working those hours report the lowest levels of life satisfaction relative to other women, with the highest levels of life satisfaction being reported amongst those in the work force either part-time or not at all. When the New York Times talked about Dutch women reporting very low levels of depression, it noted the benefit of a social-safety net allowing for work-life balance which sounds an awful lot like not-working-57-or-more-hours-per-week (like the average CEO).
Is it just CEOs with crazy working hours? Thus saith the Harvard Business Review:
A recent study shows that 45% of managerial workers in large corporations now have "extreme jobs" -- they work an average 73 hours a week and deal with additional performance pressures that range from 24/7 client demands to grueling travel schedules. Workloads are not only heavy -- they're unrelenting. Vacation has become stigmatized.
So, nope. Crazy working hours seem par for the course for high-level executives. One thing that's popped up in the news is that Marissa Mayer is pregnant and planning not to take much of a maternity leave:
"I like to stay in the rhythm of things ... My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I'll work throughout it."
That USA Today piece suggests that this might be somewhat of a double standard, with people not caring much about whether male CEOs procreate while directing a company. I'd argue that, as per the Harvard Business review piece noted above they're fairly unlikely to take much if any time off. Even Sweden, one of the world's most egalitarian societies finds that men don't really take a whole lot of paternity leave, to the extent that they seem to be investigating strategies to force men to take more of it in the name of equality.