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."