30 years ago, two Harvard Business School professors had a plan. They wanted to change the world. Start filling the pipeline with female managers, they predicted, and in 10 or 20 years at most, those women would shift into senior positions. Once that took place, could an end to sexism in the workplace (and maybe everywhere else too) be far off? Anne Jardim and her partner, Margaret Hennig, wrote one of the first books of career advice for pigeonholed secretaries and ambitious assistants: The Managerial Woman. (View an interactive feature showing differences between men and women in corporate America.)

When it was published, in 1977, just 2.3 percent of the executives in U.S. firms were women. The book—a "groundbreaking" bestseller, according to the New York Times—was onto something big. Now, three decades later, 52 percent of all middle managers are women.

Poof! Sexism in corporate America—gone.

Twenty or 30 years ago, people thought it could actually work like that: Deal with sexism and be done with it. (View an interactive timeline of gender wars in America.) But sexism didn't end. Now we dread having to bring it up again. Why? Maybe because our failure stirs up fear and embarrassment at the idea that it will never go away. These thoughts are always with us but never more so than today, thanks to Senator Hillary Clinton's tumultuous presidential campaign. She was the "inevitable" Democratic candidate—until she wasn't. Once there was a charismatic male contender, we as a nation had to once again face our true feelings about gender and power. Suddenly the question is whether we are more gender-blind or color-blind.

Consider this: While women have made huge professional gains in the past three decades, progress now appears to have slowed or stalled. In some cases, it's even backsliding. Key indicators such as pay, board seats, and corporate-officer posts all reflect a leveling off or drop in recent years. Although the gap between men's and women's pay narrowed significantly through the 1980s, gains since then have been partly erased by a drop every few years. In 2006, women over the age of 25 earned 78.7 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Labor Department. That's a decline from 2005's figure of 79.4 cents on the dollar and also represents only about a 5-cent increase since 1991.

In the legal profession, the American Bar Association says the salaries of female lawyers are slipping in comparison with those of their male colleagues. Again according to the most recent statistics available, female attorneys' weekly wages amounted to 70.5 percent of male lawyers' in 2006, compared with 77.5 percent in 2005.

Among Fortune 500 firms, the number of female officers has declined each year since 2005, following substantial gains in the past decade. Sixty-four firms had zero female officers in 2006; last year the tally was 74, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization that focuses on professional women. During the same period, the number of corporations with three or more female officers dropped from 234 to 203.

In the early and mid-1990s, the number of female appointees to Fortune 500 boards steadily increased. But since then, progress has slowed, and it stalled last year: In 2007, women held 14.8 percent of board seats in Fortune 500 companies. And some of the companies thought to be the coolest are the most shamelessly female-averse: Apple has one female board member, appointed just this year; Microsoft has one; and Google has two. A Microsoft spokesperson said, "We are proud of the makeup of our board of directors. Microsoft is sensitive to diversity and inclusion; it continues to be an ongoing area of focus across the company. Board membership will always be based on the qualifications and perspective that the people we're considering can bring to the company's business and shareholders."

Heidrick & Struggles is one of the world's top executive-search firms. Senior chairman and chief headhunter Gerry Roche groaned when I told him why I was calling. "There isn't sexism anymore," he said. "Or if there is, you can't rush things. Maybe it will take another generation to make things right."

He told me, "Boards are always asking me to bring them women candidates." But he still places nearly six times as many men as women. Of his top 10 recruiters, five are female. So why only one woman on his nine-person board? "That's a good question," he said.

Catalyst calculates that, at this rate, it will take 73 years for women to achieve parity with men at the board level. 2081, here we come!

The reasons behind the stagnation are tricky. Some people I spoke to suggested that, because of all the overt signs of progress—the Clinton candidacy, a woman speaker of the House, female Fortune 500 C.E.O.'s—the barriers women face today are more subtle and therefore harder to overcome. Basically, the popular perception is that women have made it, so there's nothing to discuss.

Therefore, if you're not a success, it's about you and your abilities (or lack of ability), because we can all certainly see that women have reached the top.

Mark Walsh, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Air America Radio, was surprised by these statistics. "I'm on two public boards and a ton of private boards, and the mantra is diversity. But as I think about it, when we interview females in the mix, the offer of a board seat typically goes to the nonwhite men—Latinos and African Americans. We think, Great, we've done diversity." He concludes, "Women have taken a backseat. They're not being allowed to drive in terms of corporate governance."

This has been the hardest assignment I have ever had. For more than a decade, I've covered gender and power in the business world. I've analyzed heroes and villains, sinners and saints, and the rest of us in between. I've never had so much trouble getting people to talk to me. Nobody really wanted to get into it. Not even the people who would seem to have the most to say. In fact, those people especially would rather not mention it at all.

Carly Fiorina promised herself she was not going to be a gender wimp. "The glass ceiling doesn't exist," she announced back in 1999, when she took the helm at Hewlett-Packard, becoming the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company. In a recent interview, she still held to that statement, saying, "The reason I wouldn't deal with gender when I became C.E.O. of H.P. is that I believed in a meritocracy where gender isn't the issue. I wanted to play by the same rules. Look, I'm not an idiot. There are clearly things that are different for men and women in leadership. But I believe you have to be the change you seek."

That's wishful thinking. It places gender politics at a safe distance. But it also suggests that, even now, Fiorina can hardly bring herself to talk about sexism. Can you blame her? Today, she has an interesting calendar: advising the C.I.A. and the Defense Department and giving talks. But she'd return to corporate life, she told me. Fortune 500 companies have power and reach; solo players do not.

When I called an executive at Morgan Stanley, she called back from her husband's cell phone. She begged me not to quote her, even anonymously, about the company's troubled track record when it comes to sex discrimination.

The firm knows there is cause for concern. Last June, Morgan's chief talent officer, Linda Riefler, invited the firm's top 20 female managing directors to participate in a new leadership program. Riefler has made classes available to female Morgan employees who want to get ahead and is also actively recruiting women.

Morgan has tried many times over the years to hold such sessions in an effort to assuage its female executives, whose grievances contributed to a lawsuit filed in 2001 by a top Morgan manager, Allison Schieffelin.

Her case file reads like a Jacqueline Susann novel with no sex, just power: On July 6, 1998, Vikram Pandit, then head of the institutional equities division at Morgan (and recently named the head of Citigroup), hosted one of a series of "women's dinners for female officers … to discuss [their] complaints," according to Schieffelin's statement. Over dinner, the women told Pandit of the ways in which they had suffered from sexual harassment or discrimination in their executive jobs. According to the complaint, he replied that this was a "cultural thing"—a "problem [he] had inherited" which "had a long history" and "could not be changed overnight." When asked about opportunities for women in the room to be considered for the highest-paying jobs (held almost exclusively by men), Pandit said, according to the lawsuit, "There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow at Morgan Stanley." If the women wanted to help "fix the problem," he said, they should "make things better for the next generation of women at Morgan Stanley." The female officers were profoundly disappointed. It was obvious, said one, that Pandit "is going to do nothing to help us in this generation."

Ten years later, it would seem, nothing much has changed. Zoe Cruz, who was fired as Morgan's co-president in late 2007, allegedly for losses in the mortgage markets, was replaced by a man. Morgan Stanley declined to comment on this issue.

But the question remains: Why wasn't there a Morgan woman who was ready to take over for Cruz? In 2006 the firm hired two Harvard scholars, a psychologist and a business professor, to help Riefler figure out why women have failed to reach Wall Street's pinnacle. Part of the reason, she was told, is that women "don't get as much feedback on their performance as men do. It's easier to give honest feedback to someone who looks like you." The study claimed that "Women need to learn to ask for feedback constantly, and ask in a way that doesn't suggest to a male boss that they will react emotionally to the feedback," Riefler says.

Morgan would not comment on the Schieffelin case—which, a spokeswoman points out, was brought up and settled under former leadership. A Citigroup spokesperson declined to comment.

It looks like Pandit was wrong about one thing: There were pots of gold at the end of the Morgan Stanley rainbow. For Schieffelin, there was a settlement in her sex-discrimination case reported to be worth $12 million. As many as 340 current and former Morgan Stanley employees received a collective settlement of $40 million.

The reluctance to even discuss sexism isn't the only gender weirdness in the air these days. Let's turn to the snapshot afforded us by a special section the Wall Street Journal publishes annually, the most recent titled "Fifty Women to Watch 2007." Its front page features a thumbnail-size photo of each woman. What some observers might be thinking, but no one actually says, is that a number of these women appear deliberately, studiously unfeminine. Why might this be so?

Well, maybe because, regardless of gender, holding a top job in today's marketplace means you have to court attention in the media. And for women, that attention inevitably focuses on how they look. Better to stay safely below the radar. The alternative: Hillary Clinton showing three centimeters of cleavage under a long-sleeved jacket on a hot day last July, which earned her a 747-word tut-tut from Robin Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Washington Post. It was a reprimand heard on blogs around the world. "No one wants to see that," scolded Givhan. "Just look away!"

When Senator Clinton turned down Vogue's request for a photo shoot, editor in chief Anna Wintour wrote, "Imagine my amazement, then, when I learned that Hillary Clinton, our only female presidential hopeful, had decided to steer clear of [being photographed for] our pages at this point in her campaign for fear of looking too feminine. The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying." She went on to ask, "How has our culture come to this?" and state, "This is America, not Saudi Arabia."

And yet, plenty of outposts of traditional femininity can still be found in corporate America. Many executives are still openly emoting, laughing and hugging each other, dressing themselves in pink shirts and cashmere sweaters.

Of course, they're all men. General Electric's Jeff Immelt is soft tissue compared with Jack Welch. Disney's Bob Iger was promoted to replace the heavy-handed Michael Eisner. One of Iger's first jobs as Disney C.E.O. was to repair relationships Eisner had busted up. The co-presidents of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelreid, named in 2006, epitomize the supposedly "female" affiliative approach to business. Bill Gates, whose career was ripped from the pages of Lord of the Flies, now preaches a "creative capitalism." Mort Zuckerman, meanwhile, has a style bordering on Oscar Wildean flamboyance.

You could say that the past 10 years have shown us how unbridled aggression damaged or destroyed businesses like Enron and Tyco. Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl is the title of a forthcoming book from publisher HarperCollins by the popular investment pundits known collectively as Motley Fool. Their spokesman, Chris Hill, says the book was inspired by the fact that men are manic and aggressive traders who transact 45 percent more trades than women; meanwhile, Buffett, the era's greatest investor, creates fortunes by making as few trades as possible. He puts a lot of time and effort into researching each one, studying the characters of the founders and creating relationships that will last for years.

Where Wall Street's drug of choice used to be cocaine, today it could be estrogen. A hedge fund broker working at SAC Capital in Connecticut sued his boss in late October for allegedly demanding that he take estrogen to become a more successful trader. The case was sealed when it moved to arbitration. A spokesperson for SAC refused to comment.

Psychologist Carol Gilligan notes the irony of this theory. "Emotional intelligence is all the rage these days, but not so long ago, women were told they could never be trusted to be intelligent because they were so emotional. What men have done is to seize on the women's movement, in particular on some of the insights that came from the study of women, and adopt them as their own," says Gilligan.

It figures, doesn't it? Women are turning their backs on femininity just as it's becoming a big profit center.

I wondered what Anne Jardim has to say, three decades later, about the mess she's caused: All these managerial women dressed up with no place to go.

Just before their enormous success with The Managerial Woman, Hennig and Jardim founded Simmons School of Management, the only M.B.A. program in the U.S. designed specifically for women. (It is now awaiting accreditation.) Jardim has been mulling over the new ways in which sexism manifests itself in leadership circles. She says the problem is that women are not seeing things from an insider's point of view. Instead, they're fighting the same old management battles over and over.

"It's different for the leadership jobs, where everyone shares the same level of technical skills, and the choice for promotions began to be made behaviorally," Jardim says. "Decisions are made based on the boss asking, 'Who is most helpful to me? Who can I trust to stand at my back? Who is loyal? Who is going to further my interests, because I will further theirs?'

"Women tend to go at these things from a mind-set of emotional equality. We are equality builders: We don't want to be better than; we want to be as good as. But men—and anyone who succeeds—come to this as a hierarchical struggle. It is always competitive," says Jardim. "Competition is more pronounced at the top, because the men who win these positions are self-selected at the highest levels. They are always thinking, 'I've got to dominate, I've got to beat you, and I've got to show that I've won.'

"Look at the status symbols in these jobs—the quality of the office, the number and variety of perks. They're the heart of the great-man syndrome. It's repeated from huge corporations to very small ones.

"Women go into top jobs thinking that hierarchy is foolishness: Let's clean this up. And we lose," says Jardim. "Circular organizations are great when everybody is doing more or less the same thing and can help each other out. But they are not useful when you get into producing anything of complexity. In a hospital, for example, there is no room for egalitarianism. A doctor would not take time away from his work to help the cashier. But good doctors can be a symbol of both authority and compassion."

Women taking pride in their authority—maybe that's the only thing missing. Once that comes, look out. Poof—no more sexism.