"One of the reasons why there aren't as many women at the top is perhaps men at the top tend to be benevolent sexists who tend to see women as people who should be shielded from danger and risks," says Desai. "They are probably thinking of women as fragile beings who need to be taken care of, that want to stay at home and raise kids and don't want to take risks and move to the top."

Desai notes that so many of the attitudes her work unveils are of an "unconscious nature," which makes beating them back particularly difficult. She says male leaders may think they are elevating women, not stifling them.

"You think of women in a very positive light, you tend to put them on a pedestal -- you don't think you are discriminating against them, you just think you are protecting them," she says of male leaders who may make up that "pocket of resistance" she and her colleagues studied. "Without realizing it you are preferring men over women when it comes to choice positions."

While the study focused on business, presidential politics, too, has faced some questions of "benign sexism." Candidates this campaign cycle have talked a whole lot about women in a feverish effort to secure their support. Along the way, some women have questioned whether all the well-meaning politicking is indeed veering toward a soppier swamp of condescension regarding the "second sex."

In April Mitt Romney told a gathering of newspaper reporters that his wife Ann "reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy," leading the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus to remind the candidate that "women aren't a foreign country. You don't need an interpreter to talk to them." (The cable cyclone surrounding whether Mrs. Romney had ever "worked a day in her life" also resulted from the cloud pressure of those comments.)

President Barack Obama, on the other hand, has tried to leverage Michelle's career success to show voters that he gets the pressures facing working women. At the White House Forum on the Economy in April, he remarked that "once Michelle and I had our girls, she gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career. ... And I know when she was with the girls she'd feel guilty that she wasn't giving enough time to her work, and when she was at work, she was feeling guilty she wasn't giving enough time for the girls."

But this kind of overt display of public sympathy offers its own problems: A few weeks back journalist Campbell Brown rapped Obama for "trying too hard" to woo women voters and "employing a tone that can come across as grating" and "too paternalistic for my taste." She urged him to stay focused on the economy -- an issue dear to men and women.

As the research shows, all most women seek is the opportunity to be judged as individuals, rather than viewed through the narrow lens of someone else's marital kaleidoscope. Perhaps Desai and her colleagues will spark the conversation that reminds male leaders that though their wives may expertly run their homes, that does not mean that other women cannot succeed in the workplace by pursuing a different set of choices.

Of course, change comes only slowly. A few weeks back, after I gave a long talk at a university about Afghanistan, women's gains, Pakistan, and the endgame for the U.S. in its longest-ever war, the gentleman who graciously moderated the conversation finished with a rhetorical flourish:

"Well, you have given us a lot to think about, particularly on women. And as Barack Obama says, 'Always listen to your wife!'"

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