: How did you endure 105 days in solitary ­confinement?

: I either had to succumb to emotion or I had to completely shut my husband, my daughter, my grandchildren, and my mother out of my mind. That’s what I decided to do. You despair when you are in solitary confinement. You don’t know what’s going on in the outside world. You don’t know whether people are working to get you out. You don’t get to see your lawyer. I coped by concentrating on the monotonous regimen I had established to keep myself from falling ­apart.

: Your survival techniques were exercise and composing a book in your mind?

: Once I was in prison, there was not much interrogation because the bulk of the questioning was done before I was taken into custody. I have macular degeneration, so I couldn’t read 10 hours a day. I would get up at a certain time in the morning, exercise on the floor, then go and shower, have breakfast, continue exercising, and start walking around my cell. I would count. I would time myself and walk maybe three hours a day. While walking, I would try to memorize what I had been asked during my last interrogation and what I had answered. I didn’t want to put anything down on paper. I also started drafting in my mind a biography of my paternal grandmother, with whom I was very close. If I was called, I would go for my interrogation, come back, and, if I wasn’t finished with my exercise, I would continue. I would shower again at six, read a book until 10, then read the newspaper. At 11, I would do another hour of exercise, and at midnight I would try to go to ­sleep.

: Was your cell the typical bare room with a cot and a toilet in the ­corner?

: I had two cells with the wall removed between them and a metal sink with two faucets. The hot-water faucet did not work. There was a shared bathroom in the hallway, but I never saw anybody else there. The prisoners were responsible for keeping the bathroom clean, and I did the cleaning. Through my two large barred windows I had access to daylight from 4:30 in the morning until nine at night in the summer, plus the fluorescent light, which was on 24 hours a day. They told me this was a prison requirement. The women guards were very human. I suppose it was partly my age [67]. If I asked them for something, they would provide it if they ­could.

: Did you ever think about your first meal when you got out, or what you would wear when you could walk down the ­street?

: Oddly enough, one day I thought that when I got home the first thing I would do will be to make myself two ­sunny-­side-­up eggs. That same evening, I came back from my interrogation around eight o’clock. I don’t eat meat, so one of the women guards said, “Unfortunately, we have a meat dish for dinner; would you like me to make you two ­sunny-­side eggs?”

: Did you have to wear a head covering all the ­time?

: In Iran, I always wear the headscarf. In winter, I wear ­a raincoat, in the summer, a robe. In prison they gave me two chadors. When I was ­taken for interrogation, I wore the chador on top of the scarf and the robe and removed it when ­I got there. I mentioned being tired of my clothes once on the phone to my mother, and ­she said, “I absolutely refuse to let you bring anything that you wore in prison into ­the house.”

: What did they ask in all those hours of ­interrogation?

: They asked why I, an Iranian American, was hired to run the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center. Was there a sinister ­motive?

I tried to explain that the United States is a country where Henry Kissinger could come at the age of 14 and be­come secretary of state. I said this is a country where nobody asks you where you come from. It was very difficult to convince them. The mentality is different. Iran has a Shiite population and a Sunni population, but only Shiites can become president. So in a country where opportunity is open mostly to one sect, it’s hard to explain that employers never ask your religion or your background. It’s your merit that ­counts.

They are very suspicious of foundations, think tanks, scholarly programs, even university programs that deal with the Middle East or Iran. Conferences are not seen by them as a way to exchange academic knowledge. They think their purpose is to put together ­like-­minded people who would work toward the goals of the United States government. For them, the Democrats and the Republicans were the ­same.

: Sure. We would start Q&A orally. They would write the same questions, and I had to answer them in writing. I’m not a person of too many words, so my answers were brief and they were very annoyed. They wanted me to explain every single meeting held by the Middle East Program of the Wilson Center. For the life of me, I could not remember who said what six years ago. Sometimes we had 30 meetings a year. Before I was sent to prison, I would call my husband [Shaul Bakhash, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of history at George Mason University] and ask him to send me lists of the meetings. Then Shaul had to ask the Wilson Center staff to put the lists together and ­e-­mail them to him. He would ­e-­mail the list to me ­and—­since I didn’t have a ­printer—­I would copy the information by hand. It would take until two or three in the morning. I was hoping I would answer their questions so they would just let me ­go.

: Did they threaten you with physical abuse or withhold food, make you go without sleep or pour water down your ­mouth?

: They never threatened me with physical abuse. The way they would threaten me is to say, “We are not satisfied with your answers, so your situation is going to worsen.” “Worsen” meant that eventually you’ll end up in prison and that’s what ­happened.

I think they must have Googled my name and gotten a copy of all the talks I’d given. They would take sentences out of context to incriminate me and would make me sit and translate. I would spend hours translating my own speeches.

: The confirmation process for Attorney General Michael Mukasey nearly stalled over what kinds of prisoner interrogations are legal. What is your view of what interrogation methods should be allowed to get prisoners to tell the ­truth?

: Torture goes on in Iranian prisons. I was very lucky that I was neither harassed physically nor tortured. I wasn’t deprived of sleep. In prison, after two hours of interrogation, always very polite, they would say, “If you are tired, we’ll stop. You can go back to your room and then we’ll come back tomorrow.”

And I would say, “No, let’s finish,” because I was always hoping that it would be over.

But solitary confinement is a kind of torture. I could call my mother, but our conversation was very brief: “How are you, how is my husband, the children?”

She would say, “Everybody is fine. We are all doing all we can for you.”

I didn’t want to go any further lest they would stop me from calling ­her.

I’m horrified by “waterboarding”—that American leaders actually discuss whether it’s torture or it’s not torture. I was always very cautious not to complain to my interrogators because if I said something they would immediately come back and say, “What about Guantánamo? What about Abu Ghraib?” There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who went through Evin Prison and were beaten up or tortured or harassed. Torture is ­immoral.

: Do you think your interrogators really believed that you were guilty of trying to foment ­revolution?

Esfandiari: I don’t know. The first time they used the expression “velvet revolution,” I said, “What is that?” They thought I was being clever. But then they found out that I truly didn’t ­know.

From their point of view, it makes sense. Their argument is that the United States is probably not going to attack Iran because it is bogged down in Afghanistan and in Iraq. But the United States would like to bring about a regime change in Iran. How would they go about it but through a soft revolution or a velvet revolution? How do you succeed in fomenting such a revolution? Through foundations, universities, and think tanks. By organizing conferences and workshops, and empowering women. By providing money for local NGOs, supporting civil society activities, and by looking for the best and the brightest among the intellectuals, bringing them together with colleagues in the United States and Europe and creating a network of ­like-­minded people who then go back to Iran and discuss democratization, opening up the society, and then push for regime ­change.

According to my interrogators, the Ministry of Intelligence had a room full of charts proving this. They dismissed the notion that the Wilson Center is nonpartisan. The mission statement of the Center says it “aims to unite the world of ideas to the world of policy by supporting ­pre­eminent scholarship and linking that scholarship to issues of concern to officials in Washington.” They highlighted that sentence and said, “Here you are. Your mission is to link.”

And I said, “Yes, but to link means to bring together people of different backgrounds and different ways of thinking and expose them to each other.” They didn’t buy that. They said, “People would accept your invitation, would come to the Wilson Center, and through you would meet intelligence officers and members of the State Department.”

Iran has convinced itself that it is encircled by the United States. They see the U.S. in the Persian Gulf, in Central Asia, in Afghanistan; and NATO is in Turkey. They feel as if they are under siege. They don’t expect a military offensive, so what is left, they think, but to use NGOs and women’s groups and universities to bring change? They have convinced themselves this is ­true.

: How did they treat you: as an American or an Iranian, as a grandmother or a ­scholar?

: They convinced themselves that I was misguided and was of no use. I think it was partly because I was an older person. I could have been either their mother or their grandmother. They were very much concerned that I was losing a lot of weight. Maybe they thought, “She is sick, and if we raise our voice or keep her for long hours she is going to fall apart.” Because I was an Iranian American, they thought there would be an ­outcry.

Maybe they thought, “She is sick, and if we raise our voice or keep her for long hours she is going to fall apart.” Because I was an Iranian American, they thought there would be an ­outcry.

: When you went to Iran, did you realize the risk you were taking? One of your colleagues remembers saying to you before you left, “It’s so dangerous to go there. Aren’t you worried?” And your answer was, “Oh, they know me.”

: I have been going several times a year for almost 14 years, and of course, every time you go to the Middle East, you take your life in your hands. I thought I was secure. But my experience showed that despite being a student of Iran I was very naive. I should have known that eventually they would become suspicious as to why someone like me goes to Iran so often. The reason is that my 93-­year-­old mother lives there. I would go two or three times a year, and my sister would go once a year. Between us, we made sure that somebody was with her every three months to help her with her accounts, to look after her for a week to see what her needs are, and so ­on.

: Has your mother ever considered ­leaving?

: No. Never. She married my father and came to Iran and has lived all her life there. She wants to die in Iran and be buried next to my ­father.

: Is she worried about losing her apartment because she had to put it up for bail so you could be ­released?

: We just have to wait and see. I have not been charged, and they haven’t announced a court case. I have a lawyer in Iran, so if it comes to that, we’ll see what we can ­do.

: At one point, Iran­ian television ran a “documentary” that some commentators called a “confession.”

: I haven’t seen it yet. Three other people were featured as well. I’m told they showed clips of Central Asian countries and focused on the idea of a velvet ­revolution.

During my first week in prison, they said they wanted to interview me on camera. I said that “whatever I have been telling you and writing to you I’m more than happy to say on camera.” I didn’t want to start bargaining, because I had nothing to ­hide.

One day they announced that we were going to do the taping on Thursday. I talked for an hour; it was as if I was lecturing. I gave my age. I said I was raised in Iran, went to school in Iran, went to university in Austria, came back, worked as a journalist, and then joined a women’s organization. My last work in Iran before the revolution was running a group of museums and cultural centers. They still exist and are quite active. There was nothing ­political.

: There’s one place in the TV program where you’re talking about foundations, and then all of a sudden you’re quoted as saying, “The objective is to bring about change in Iranian ­decision-­making institutions.” In what context did that come ­up?

: What I was saying was that the erroneous perception in Iran is that if you take part in conferences, if you arrange workshops, if you talk to ­like-­minded people, it’s with one aim only and that is to bring about change. My husband and my daughter said my sentences sometimes didn’t hang together and a lot of cutting and pasting had taken ­place.

: Going back to December 30, 2006, when your ordeal began, you were going to the airport in a taxi at about 1 am. Is robbery a problem in ­Iran?

: Tehran used to be very secure, but no longer. Four men blocked the car, jumped out with knives, and told the driver to open the trunk. One took my suitcase, the other pulled my ­carry­on bag from the front seat, and a third took my purse. “At least give me my ticket and my passport,” I asked, but they took everything. They could easily have kidnapped me, which also takes place in Tehran. As days passed, more and more friends and acquaintances said this is not your ordinary robbery. This must have had a political ­motive.

: Those of us around for the Iranian ­hostage-­taking in 1979 remember that when the hostages were eventually released, they tried to sue the Iranian government. Have you thought of ­suing?

: No, absolutely not. I’m an Iranian. How would I sue my own ­government?

: How is Iran different from other countries in the Middle ­East?

Esfandiari: Iran is a real country, not one carved up or put together in the last century. It has a 2,500-year history. Persian is an ­Indo-­European language. Iranians are not Arabs, they are Aryans. They are highly educated people, highly nationalistic, and very much aware of their culture and tradition. Although it’s an Islamic country, the majority of the people are Shiite, not Sunni. What is important and is Iranian and not Islamic is the Persian New Year, which starts on the 21st of March, a tradition that goes back to ­pre-­Islamic days. That really sets them apart from the rest of the ­region.

: Given its legacy, do you think it’s ironic that Iran is now regarded as the bad guy in the Middle ­East?

: Political development has nothing to do with the culture and history of a country. The United States and Iran have been at odds since the Islamic Revolution. It started with the hostage crisis and went gradually from bad to worse. The Iranians on a number of occasions have tried to show goodwill, but every time the Iranians tried to reach out, the United States either didn’t welcome it or understand it, or something came up. So now such bad ­feelings—­that’s putting it very ­mildly—­exist between the two governments that unless they sit and talk to each other, there is no way to settle their differences. They have to sit face to face and talk. Diplomacy, exchanges among NGOs, conferences, are all wonderful. But at the end, it’s the governments who have to make the ultimate decisions. And so far these two governments, the United States and Iran, have not really talked to one another. As long as they don’t, relations will probably get worse. There are many problems on the table: the nuclear ­issue (­on which I am not well ­versed), ­Iran’s involvement in Iraq, Iran’s support of Hezbollah, Iran’s support of Hamas. It’s the question of terrorism, although the Iranians were not at all involved in the 9/11 incident in the United ­States.

: Do you think the United States can accept a nuclear ­Iran?

: I think the United States probably will not have much choice; it will have to accept a highly developed peaceful nuclear program there. The United States has accepted and is living with a nuclear Pakistan. Pakistan is a much more volatile country than Iran. Iran’s foreign policy, although often problematic, has also been measured and pragmatic. The Iranian population supports a peaceful nuclear program. It’s not a whim of the government. It started under the shah and it has continued. Taking out these nuclear facilities or bombing them would alienate the population against the United States and only delay the nuclear program for another 10, 15 years, but that’s ­it.

Iranians are the only people in the region who like the United States. Average Iranians are very fond of America and would like to send their children to study there and visit and so on, but there are visa ­restrictions.

: Do you think Iran sponsors terrorism in ­Iraq?

: I can’t say. I think they have a presence in Iraq. Sure. The majority of the population is Shiite in Iraq, and there is a close relationship between the two holy places of Najaf on the Iraq side and Qom in Iran. The head of the judiciary in Iran has roots in Iraq. Ayatollah Sistani, the leader of the Shiite community in Iraq, is an Iranian. The Revolutionary Guards are probably there; they don’t deny it. But whether they are the reason for the mess in Iraq, I don’t think so. I really don’t think ­so.

As part of an international effort by intellectuals, NGOs, and her colleagues, Lee H. Hamilton, director of the Wilson Center, appealed to the Iranian president, vice president, speaker of the parliament, and eventually to Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Iran’s spiritual leader. Two months later, Khameni wrote back. The issue would be addressed, he said. Esfandiari was released on August 21. She returned to work at the Wilson Center within days. She was interviewed by

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On December 30, 2006, Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, was stopped and robbed on her way to the Tehran airport.Trapped in Iran without a passport, she was interrogated by intelligence agents almost daily for six weeks and was then placed in solitary confinement.

Ordeal in Iran: An Interview with Haleh Esfandiari

On July 17, 1975, less than a year after President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal, 

publisher Katharine Graham threw open the doors of her Georgetown mansion for one of her trademark dinners, with strolling violinists and elegant cuisine. Along the ­right-­hand wall of the foyer, a wheel of tiny envelopes held the table numbers of the 58 guests. On the terrace, Graham, in a pink hostess outfit, greeted people from five different levels of the paper’s management by name, introducing each newcomer flawlessly. Then everybody sat down for a gourmet dinner served on her mother’s hand-painted ­china.

It was a virtuoso performance by one of the masters of gracious entertaining. But Graham was applying her formidable social skills to a different arena: her company’s business. Although thePostwas then at the height of its influence and glamour, several of its 13 unions were fighting for their lives. Union contracts were up for negotiation, and Graham, who had become an instant corporate president 12 years earlier on the suicide of her husband, was preparing for trouble. She fretted that the newspaper’s managers, on whom she would have to rely to publish the paper in the event of strikes, didn’t think of themselves as a team. She wanted her staff to work together and get along. So on a hot July night, Katharine Graham did a stereotypically female thing: She threw a ­party.

Today her management method is called “transformational,” or ­cooperative—­as opposed to the “transactional,” or authoritarian, manner then supposedly employed by the men who ran America’s biggest companies. But her style was just ­that—­a style. When it came to making decisions, Graham was as tough as any man. She fired former secretary of the Navy Paul Ignatius when he disappointed her as president of the company, hustled his successor upstairs, and ousted a subsequent replacement. When the pressmen’s union went on strike in the middle of the night three months after her garden party, she got the paper out with a crew of managers and volunteers. When the pressmen turned down her contract offer, she replaced them with nonunion ­workers.

True, she talked stirringly about women’s ­issues—­sensitized by a friendship with Gloria Steinem, no less. But the 

 implemented little of the feminist’s agenda. It had no daycare center and offered only a ­bare-­bones maternity leave. ­Part-­time schedules to accommodate child rearing were a rare privilege, and ­part-­time employees were ineligible for raises. Although the paper was often generous in family tragedies, it had to issue checks to its female news employees to settle an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sex discrimination suit over hiring, pay, promotions, and leave. Graham was sympathetic to women, but the pay, benefits, and ­day-­to-­day operations of the nation’s most famous ­female-­led company broke no feminist ground. Today, Graham’s longtime executive editor, Ben Bradlee, cannot think of a single decision that she made because she was a ­woman.

The corporate world of Graham’s era was a men’s club, by and large, staffed with female worker bees. Little had changed since William H. Whyte wrote his classic midcentury dissection of corporate conformity and bureaucratic culture, 

(1956).Whyte’s index includes a single entry for women: “slenderness progression.” But under pressure from a growing women’s movement and the federal government, by the 1970s businesses were promoting a few women, although it wasn’t at all clear how they would fare when they took charge. At the beginning of the decade, Dr. Edgar Berman, a Democratic national committeeman and close confidante of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, created a minor uproar when he opined that “raging hormonal imbalance” rendered women too unstable to hold top jobs, such as president of the United ­States.

But Berman’s view was not all that unusual, at least among men. Women held only a tiny fraction of supervisory jobs, a category that included management of secretarial pools and other ghettoized occupations. They were simply excluded from elite downtown clubs, golf courses, and other institutions. Leading companies ran advertising campaigns portraying women as ­playthings—­and they worked. The National Organization for Women was outraged by the 1971 “I’m Cheryl, Fly Me” ads for National Airlines, but the number of passengers grew 23 percent in the first year of the ­campaign.

Today’s corporations are as different from their predecessors as 45-rpm records are from iPods. Women hold half of all management, professional, and related jobs in the United States, and—although some of their companies are small—nearly one-quarter of all CEO positions. Between 1997 and 2002 women started an average of 424 new ventures each day, and by 2004 about 6.7 million privately held businesses were majority owned by women, says 

. At the very top of the corporate heap, among the country’s Fortune 500 companies, women hold 15.6 percent of corporate officer positions (defined as board elected or board appointed), according to Catalyst, a business research institute in New York. They occupy 14.6 percent of the seats on boards of directors. And they run 13 of the corporations.

That’s not the revolution many had hoped for, but it’s a significant change. The leadership positions held by women are not only in the corporate world but in the nonprofit sector, the military, higher education, and other fields. They sit on boards and campaign for public office. One of them even stands a good chance of making Edgar Berman’s worst nightmare come true. In fact, now the shoe is sometimes on the other foot. A handful of management gurus in the business world are proclaiming that possessing a pair of­ X-­chromosomes equips a person to be a superior­ leader.

The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership 

(2007), writers are advancing what some call the “great woman school of leadership.” Magazines now assure women that their feminine style will give them an edge in the new “transformational” corporation. 

has declared that women have the “right stuff” and, even more sensationally, that a “new gender gap” might leave men as “losers in a global economy that values mental powers over might.”

After several decades of experience and enough studies to fill a sizable hard drive, there ought to be answers to some basic questions about women’s leadership: Does difference make a difference? Are women more effective leaders, producing more successful companies? Are ­female-­led firms better places to ­work?

Increasingly, research shows that ­women—­surprise!—are indeed different from men. They do a better job, on average, of collaborating, coaching, teaching, and inspiring others to be creative. Yet it is far from clear that gender in the corner office makes a momentous difference. Evidence that ­female-­led organizations produce superior results is scant. A leadership style that works well in certain fields may bomb in others. And as people climb closer to the top of an organization, ­gender-­related styles of management seem to matter less than other factors in determining who wins the race and what they do as ­leaders.

Alice H. Eagly, chair of the department of psychology at Northwestern University and perhaps the most commonly cited scholar on ­gender-­based leadership differences, finds in a recent overview of many studies in the field that superiors, peers, and subordinates generally rate women better leaders than men. Women are more “interpersonally oriented,” a key ingredient in the transformational leadership style, now themodus du jourin the American corporation. Transformational leaders lead by example, empower their subordinates, and focus on the future. They stress cooperation, mentoring, and collaboration rather than a ­top-­down, authoritarian structure. Many of these attributes are exactly the traits associated with women, even if not all women exhibit ­them.

But there are wrinkles. Leaders face expectations that they must meet to persuade others to get behind them, and what peers and subordinates look for can vary according to circumstance. “Neither men nor women are better,” Eagly says. “Effectiveness is contextual.” Women are ranked higher as leaders in fields such as education, government, and social services, where there is more focus on interaction ­and—­some ­say—­less on the bottom line. And since women are already more numerous in the upper ranks of these fields, those on the way up have an easier time persuading others to accept them as leaders. But in male-dominated occupations, from the military to auto sales, women are still judged less effective than ­men.

In many industries, stereotypes about leaders are ripped from the playbook of men, and women are at a disadvantage because they don’t look “usual or natural” in a leader role, Eagly says. “Women in highly masculine domains often have to contend with expectations and criticisms that they lack the toughness and competitiveness needed to succeed.” When they do show grit, they are accused of being unfeminine. Just ask Hillary Clinton, who is criticized for being both too steady and controlled and not emotionalenough.

Recalling her stint as the head of the troubled computer giant ­Hewlett-­Packard, Carly Fiorina said in a recent interview that her enemies in the corporate and tech worlds routinely referred to her “as either a ­bimbo—­too soft, or a ­bitch—­too hard.” She shook up the entire company, eventually laying off 36,000 people and attracting almost as much media attention as the executives who bankrupted Enron and went to jail. “It broke my heart every time we had to do it,” she says ofthe layoffs. “It was tearing what people thought was the heart of the company. But it had to be done to save more jobs. Once I was fired, they said I didn’t do enough of it.” ­Hewlett-­Packard has since gone from being a laggard to a leader, but Fiorina’s successor, rightly or wrongly, has reaped much of the ­credit.

Barbara Krumsiek, CEO and president of the Calvert Group, a $14 billion mutual fund company, said in an interview that advancement after a certain point “is not a matter of competence, it is how you are perceived.” After her first daughter was born, Krumsiek, then still climbing the corporate ladder, began hearing comments suggesting that she should step aside. A colleague flat out told her, “Women who really love their children stay home with them.” Feeling that she had to produce still more signs of her commitment to work, she hired an executive coach and became active in professional organizations. Her climb ­resumed.

While perceptions matter a great deal, the problem with research such as Eagly’s is that it only goes so far. It is one thing to ask people whether the female bosses they know are good leaders, another to find hard evidence that female leadership produces results that are better. Scholars have been able to provide correlations, but no proof. The research group Catalyst, for example, divided the Fortune 500 companies into quartiles based on the share of top management jobs held by women, and found that the companies in the top quartile performed 35 percent better (judged by return on equity) than those in the bottom quartile. But the study didn’t show that women were responsible for that success. It may be, for example, that successful companies tend to hire more ­women.

It is hardly surprising that scholars have not been able to identify a precise “female difference.” Just consider the political agendas of these leaders: Israel’s Golda Meir, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, India’s Indira Gandhi, Germany’s Angela Merkel. In the U.S. Senate, what common adjective could describe the leadership of California’s Barbara Boxer and North Carolina’s Elizabeth Dole?

In the Darwinian world of the contemporary corporation, survival of the fittest requires ambitious men and women to adapt whatever methods work, even if they are soft, “feminine” methods. Under the pressure of competition and globalization, the modern corporation has gone from fat to lean, from vertical to horizontal, and from homogeneous to diverse. Status and hierarchies are out, team building, “open innovation,” and learning are in. The corporation’s work force is better educated, more mobile, and more demanding than it was only a few decades ago. In this new world, the ­top-­down leadership paradigm of the past looks only a little less outdated than a watch fob. The new mantras, propounded in books such as 

(2007), are mass collaboration, “authentic” leadership, and becoming a “learning” organization through communication, vision, and shared power. And who’s better at collaboration and communication than women? Well, sometimes men are, or at least they are no ­worse.

Analyzing the results of 50-to-80-minute interviews with male and female owners of 229 firms in the mid-1990s, management scholars Jennifer E. Cliff, Nancy Langton, and Howard E. Aldrich found striking evidence that gender had “no effect” on the organizational design and management of companies. The traditional explanation would have been that women were forced to adopt a more stereotypically masculine approach. In fact, the researchers found that “the male owners in our sample were just as likely as their female counterparts to have implemented archetypically feminine organizational arrangements and practices in their firms.” Both male- and ­female-­headed firms, for example, had reduced the levels of hierarchy and cut back on formal policies in favor of more open and informal procedures and modes of ­communication—­actions associated with women ­leaders.

What was different between men and women … was the way they talked about leadership.

What was different between men and women, the authors wrote in 2005 in the journal 

 about leadership. Men said they wanted to be thought of “as God . . . as capable . . . as the captain of the ship who calls the shots.” Women wanted to be thought of as “someone who’s here to work for my employees . . . as a resource . . . [as having] their ­well-­being at heart.” But despite these contrasting self-evaluations, the management methods men and women adopted were, on the whole, “indistinguishable.”

Female business leaders interviewed recently tended to stress that while gender bias often posed special challenges every step of the way, the leadership qualities needed near the top transcended gender. “We don’t have a real meritocracy in this country, although we have made great progress,” Fiorina says. “Women face barriers and have to work harder to get ahead. Men and women have different styles, and people focus on the style of women and the substance of men. But the fundamentals of leadership are not gender specific.”

Ginger Graham, a former Arkansas state rodeo queen with a Harvard MBA, has had an unusual career. She got her first job selling herbicides to local farmers as an agricultural economics major at the University of Arkansas, rose at Eli Lilly, and eventually was named CEO of Amylin, a biopharmaceutical company. When Graham (no relation to Katharine Graham) took over at Amylin in 2003, she adopted a management style that would be unusual, perhaps inconceivable, for a man. The morning after the company’s diabetes drug, Symlin, was finally approved by the federal government after 18 years of research and development, she arrived in the office in a Sleeping Beauty costume and handed out copies of the fairy tale. She wanted to inspire a company that now needed to set up a manufacturing operation and hire a sales force almost overnight. When a second drug was approved six weeks later, Graham jumped into the fountain at corporate headquarters. She punctuated company sales meetings with shouts of “whoo-hoo!”

By the time Graham stepped down, this past March, the price of Amylin’s stock had nearly doubled. But while her style may have been flamboyant at times, her management moves were classic. “You stand alone in these jobs,” she says. “Obviously they are well paid and very fulfilling. They call for an element of collaboration, but at some point you must make the transition from being a collaborator to a decision maker. You have to transform empathy and engagement to accountability and decisiveness.”

Finally, there is the touchiest question of all: If women are such effective leaders, why aren’t more of them leading? The percentage of the 500 biggest firms with women at the helm is not even close to cracking the three percent barrier, and women’s advances in a number of fields have come to a ­standstill.

reignited feminism in 1963, women poured into politics, medicine, the clergy, and the military. Most ­all-­male college enrollment policies crumbled within a decade. Today, more than half of all college graduates are women. They are a majority in many fields of graduate study. Affirmative action policies have helped women move into many occupations. But after early increases in the 1970s and ’80s, some of the advances have stalled. The percentage of married mothers of preschool children who are in the labor force has dropped four points since 1997.

If women are such effective leaders, why aren’t more of them leading?

In politics, despite the emergence of stars such as Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, and Nancy Pelosi, gains are uneven. Female representation in state legislatures hasn’t budged much since topping 22 percent of legislative seats in 2001. Even some advances are colored by puzzling setbacks. While young women’s level of participation in college sports has soared, thanks in part to federal Title IX legislation, the number of female coaches has dropped. Coaches often travel three or four days a week and must go on many recruiting trips during the ­off-­season, a schedule that particularly puts off women who have, or want to have, a family, according to 

Anxiety over this stalled progress may explain the firestorm touched off by Princeton graduate 

 describing what she called an ­“opt-­out” generation of highly educated women like herself who said, “The heck with it, I’d rather stay at home with my kids.”

At first dismissed by some as a luxury confined to elite wives with ­well-­paid husbands, the ­“opt-­out” phenomenon has found some support in statistical evidence, notably the data that show a dip in employment among women at every income level who have younger children. (Sixty percent of these women are now in the labor force.)

“Women naturally don’t like this ­hard-­driving competitive atmosphere that is part of business and law firms,” argues Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum and a lawyer who played a prominent role in the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. It isn’t really motherhood that makes women drop out, she says; “they just get tired of it.”

Belkin’s passionate critics scoff that the moms-go-home theme has been “discovered” at least four times in the last half-century byThe New York Timesalone. They say it’s no surprise that women in jobs with no flexibility, forced to choose between feeling they aren’t good mothers or aren’t good workers, elect to stay home. “If women feel undervalued and stalled in their jobs, no wonder they opt out,” says Sally J. Kenney, director of the Center on Women and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota. At the same time, many advocates surely worry that the ­opt-­out phenomenon will reinforce the negative expectation that women won’t go the distance, harming the prospects of those who remain in the ­race.

For more than a hundred years, women have explained their lack of power by citing barriers: laws that bar women from certain jobs, prejudice, a pay gap that saps the incentive to keep working, the unequally shared burden of child care and housework, the “mommy track.” In addition to the “glass ceiling,” British writers have identified a “glass cliff”—the overrepresentation of women in nearly impossible ­high-­level jobs in which the risk of failure is high. It is said that women are denied plum assignments because they’re thought likely to opt out. They choke in emergencies. (Now making the rounds is a study of professional ­tennis—­whose methodology has been vehemently ­assaulted—­showing that women make more unforced errors on crucial points than on others, a difference absent in men.) They won’t work as many hours as men. (A recent 

survey of “extreme jobs” found that women in these ­high-­pressure white-collar occupations “are not matching the hours logged by their male colleagues.”)

Many barriers still exist in some form, but increasingly the question of whether women get to the top of the heap hinges on their own choices and actions. It’s possible that the ascension of more women will produce a tipping point, dramatically easing the way for future female leaders in every field. Perhaps the continuing transformation of the corporation and other institutions will make them more female friendly and humane. Maybe Americans three decades from now will look back on our ­present-­day conundrums with the same disbelief with which we view “fly me” advertisements.

Yet a consistent message from women who have reached the heights is that gender does not make a big difference in conducting the essential business of leadership. Katharine Graham had to fire executives and crush unions. It was her son and successor, Donald, who added ­female-­friendly benefits such as family leave, ­tax-­deferred accounts for dependent care, and ­part-­time schedules when they were needed to attract and retain talented people. For mother and son alike, the task was the same: Keep their company healthy and growing.

Just when women have the greatest opportunities in history, top jobs have become more demanding than ever. The pace of change has quickened, the rigors of competition have increased, and the scrutiny of leaders has grown more intense. The route to the top may remain even more difficult than it is for men, but the decision that women face now is whether they want to ­enter—­and perhaps hope to ­alter—­the demolition ­derby.

. She was a reporter and editor during a long career at 

Cover image courtesy of Shutterstock/Peshkova

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Women now hold half of all management jobs in America. Business books and magazines tout their superior leadership style. What’s really changing in the country’s corner offices?

Judith M. Havemann