‘I cannot and will not give up my family time.” That was Paul Ryan explaining last week that even if he takes the job as speaker of the House, he still plans to go home each week to see his wife and three young children.

It’s not going to be easy. A Web site called Glassdoor came out with a list of the 25 jobs with the highest ratings for work-life balance. And leading Congress wasn’t on the list.

The jobs that did make the cut included data scientist, UX (“user experience”) designer, digital marketing manager, civil engineer and lab assistant. Indeed, a surprising number of the positions that allow for work-life balance seem to require a background in science.

It’s a little counterintuitive that the jobs that are most compatible with a happy family life are also jobs that require a serious education in math and science, ones that some might even see as traditionally male positions.

Young people probably assume that it’s squishier humanities-focused positions — in academia, journalism, government, public relations, etc. — that will allow them the most work-life balance.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. A list of “24 high-paying jobs for people who don’t like stress” from Business Insider was also dominated by positions in the hard sciences. From mathematician and material scientist to geographers and agricultural engineers, it seems that the key to making it home for dinner with the kids or being able to take off weekends is being good with numbers.

Are companies dominated by the patriarchy suddenly coming to realize the importance of work-life balance? Have the people running chemistry labs been reading the mommy blogs?

Probably not. So what explains this shift?

In The Washington Post, Jena McGregor writes: “That could be because the tech-driven nature of those jobs allows them to be done anywhere, or exist in companies with more generous policies toward remote work or unconventional hours.”

Perhaps, but there are a lot of jobs — not just tech ones — that can be done from anywhere these days. Just ask all those parents trying to answer e-mails from the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games.

She also suggests that “higher salaries and more job openings” would make a difference. No doubt people have more flexibility and ability to determine the terms of their employment when their skills are in greater demand. But in most professions, even extremely talented people can’t simply remake the way their industry works in order to suit their needs at home.

The number of Ivy League-educated lawyers who tried to work fewer hours after they gave birth can fill Harvard’s football stadium. But lawyers still bill by the hour, and the people who put in the most hours are considered the most valuable.

What’s different about the professions that are more scientifically oriented is that they have a real product, a definite endpoint — an actual result by which their success can be measured.

Forgive a little bit of overgeneralization here, but for those of us who are simply paid to write — whether memos, briefs, articles, blog posts, notes, proposals, requests for proposals or annual reports — there’s no real end to the work. Often there’s no particular question we’re answering, and so the more questions we ask and the more answers we give, the more pages we publish and the more productive we seem.

All that was fine when offices closed at 5 p.m. and no one worked on weekends. But now that technology has allowed us to be available 24 hours a day, the way we in the “humanities” professions show we’ve done our job is by our endless flow of words.

Whether they’re e-mails or social-media posts or even conference calls, employers in universities and government and journalism and the nonprofit world judge workers by the quantity (and only occasionally the quality) of words.

Just take academia, where a 2009 report from the American Enterprise Institute found that in the previous half-century, the number of language and literature academic monographs rose to 72,000 from 13,000, all while the readership for such products diminished.

You might think that the folks in the English Department would be more understanding of your need to go home and eat dinner with your children. After all, you’re not working on a cure for cancer. But if they let you off the hamster wheel, someone might notice that nothing changed.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.