A subtle reminder of stereotypes that exist about employed women surfaced with a jolt recently when I read in The New York Times about a study of the behavior of female olive baboons in Gombe National Park, Tanzania.

The reason I say the study sent a "subtle" nudging of memory is that it in no way attempts to link animal behavior to that of human animals, or even to establish an analogy between the baboons and career women.

That's not its purpose. Instead, the careful, long-term research, outlined in the Times story by Natalie Angier, is an examination of the lifetime reproduction performance of animals in their own social strata. It contains no comparisons with women struggling to climb the corporate ladder.