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A recurring issue in glass-ceiling debates revolves around whether women are, either directly or indirectly, excluded from high-level jobs. Many offices tend to promote people according to a concept called "homosocial reproduction"—essentially, the spoils go to the workers who move in the right social circles. If your workplace is a boy's club where the high-performers smoke cigars and play golf together, this theory would dictate that the next big promotion is likely not going to the quiet female analyst who knits during lunchtime.

That's why this one fact, from a Pew survey released last month, is so devastating.

Pew asked 2,002 people if they would prefer to work with men or women. Most—78 percent of men and 76 percent of women—said they didn't care. But for the 22 percent who did have a preference, "it’s men who get the nod from both sexes by about a 2-1 margin," Pew's Rich Morin writes. In fact, more women said they'd rather work with men than men did.

When the results are broken down by generation, workers who were born between 1925 and 1942 were most likely to say they prefer working with men (21 percent), and Millennials (born in the 1980s and 1990s) were least likely to (11 percent). But from there, the percentage doesn't track with age. In fact, more workers from Generation X, who are closer in age to Millennials, said they'd prefer to work with men (19 percent) than did the middle-aged Boomers (16 percent).

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Millennials may seem gender-neutral by comparison, but in other parts of the same survey, their responses were equally bleak. Far more Millennial women than men (59 percent versus 19 percent) said being a working parent makes it hard to advance in a job, and fewer Millennial women said they aspired to become managers.