This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

The second annual Women's March was held in January.

When we cannot just be loud with our mouths, we must be loud with our votes, ladies and gentlemen who are with us.

The focus was on getting people registered to vote.

Everyone who enjoys the privilege of voting in our elections must do the house in 2018.

Let's get more people in Washington on our side, right?

It drives me into the voting booth.

In the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, there are going to be many women running for political office.

According to research from Rutgers University, more than 400 women are estimated to be on the ballot for the US House of Representatives.

That's unprecedented.

All this made us want to revisit an episode we first aired in October of 2016.

If you look at the gender makeup of Congress, you'll see that fewer than one in five legislators are women.

At Fortune 500 companies, fewer than one in 20 CEOs are women.

And look at all the presidents of the United States.

Now, I know there was a long time when women couldn't be president, but if men and women had an equal shot at the White House,

the odds of having 45 presidents in a row all be men, about one in 36 trillion.

What explains the death of women in top leadership positions?

Is it bias, a lack of role models, the old boys club?

Sure, but it goes deeper than that.

Women are trapped in a catch-22, a paradox so deeply embedded in our culture that there are few means of escape.

And so it is really that very, very fine line between being a shrew on the one hand and a puppet on the other that any woman in public life has to walk.

The puppet, the shrew, and the double-bind facing women who want to lead this week on Hidden Brain.

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