Whether you like her or not (and plenty of people don’t), Hillary Clinton’s showing on Super Tuesday says something about how far women have come in being taken seriously as leaders. Clinton has noted that when her 88-year-old mother was born, women couldn’t even vote.

But it would be going too far to say that Clinton is proof that women are now judged solely on the strength of their leadership and that gender doesn’t matter. The pummeling that Carly Fiorina  took during her tenure at HP is proof of that. Further evidence can be found in book published this fall, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders.

Some business books toss off anecdotes and pretend that’s research. Not so here. The authors, Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, both college professors, pack the book with studies and data to support their answers to the provocative questions serve as chapter titles:

• Is there still a glass ceiling? No. Instead, women have to negotiate a labyrinth of conflicting demands, expectations and barriers to advance.
• Are men natural leaders? Men score higher in some traits associated with leadership. And women do better in others.
• Do family responsibilities hold women back? Is discrimination still a problem? Yes and yes.

I think it’s interesting that the authors settled on the labyrinth as their metaphor. Without going too much into the mythic realm, as a recent post did, I’ll just mention that in Greek mythology, it was a woman, Ariadne, who knew her way around the labyrinth that her father had ordered built to hold a monster, the Minotaur. And it was Ariadne who gave her lover, Theseus, the thread he used to find his way out of the maze after killing the creature. So what did Ariadne get for her trouble? Theseus abandoned her on the island of Naxos. I told you that office romances never work out.

Through the Labyrinth is fascinating and depressing in almost equal measures, depending on the page and the finding. For example:

• Unlike women who have bumped into the glass ceiling because they’re not perceived as leadership material in a male-dominated world, men working in female-dominated careers often ride the “glass escalator,” ascending faster than women. Their token status works for them.
• The double bind is alive and well: Acting like a man—assertive and aggressive—is often seen as the wrong way to proceed. Acting like a woman—being soft-spoken, or just plain soft—is just as likely to block professional progress. The authors quote Kim Campbell, who served as Canadian prime minister briefly in 1993: “I don’t have a traditionally female way of speaking. I don’t end my sentences with a question mark. I’m quite assertive. If I didn’t speak the way I do, I wouldn’t have been seen as a leader. But my way of speaking may have grated on people who were not used to hearing it from a woman. It was the right way for a leader to speak, but it wasn’t the right way for a woman to speak. It goes against type.”
• Women endure some astounding suggestions from their bosses and colleagues on how they should behave to get ahead in the workplace. The authors quote Patricia Woertz, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, who recalled that one of her first bosses “assured her that children would ruin her career: ‘Get yourself fixed,’ he said, ‘and put it on your expense report.’ ” Woertz didn’t take the advice. She had three children, and an “extraordinarily successful business career,” the authors say.

If you can hang in until Chapter 10, you’ll find some sort-of-good news—a discussion of the techniques that women use  to successfully thread their way through the labyrinth. As you might guess, it’s all about juggling, balancing and, sometimes, overachieving. “It isn’t fair, but women often need to be exceptionally good to be credited with the abilities of less-competent men,” Eagly and Carli write.

And as if they could hear the screams of their readers, they add a few pages later: “Some readers may object to some of our advice, because it implies that women must accommodate themselves to existing cultural and organizational norms rather than the other way around. Our point is that women should not wait to seek leadership until organizational and cultural changes have created a level playing field. Women who initially break into male-dominated roles face special challenges, but when they are successful, they can foster progressive organizational change that creates greater fairness for the women who follow in their footsteps.”

It takes guts, that’s for sure. Here’s a thank you to Clinton, Fiorina, Woertz and all the other women who are leading the way through the labyrinth. Keep an eye out for the Minotaur.