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"My work product determined my success -- not private dinners with the congressman," wrote one of them, Mary Vought, now president of Vought Strategies LLC, in a Washington Post op-ed. Looking back on her time as press secretary to the House Republican Conference under then-Chairman Pence, she said, "I don't consider it to be a period of missed opportunities."

But this controversy is bigger than Pence. It raises long-simmering questions about the many ways that cultural norms, traditions and attitudes can subtly work to elbow women out of the normal everyday circles of access and communications that can crack glass ceilings.

Pence's policy appears to be grounded in what is often called in evangelical circles the Billy Graham Rule. The famous evangelist came up with the ban on alone time with women among other behavioral guidelines in a 1948 meeting with his ministry team. They wanted reassure the faithful and the public that they would behave better on the preaching circuit than the Elmer Gantry stereotypes left behind by some other traveling evangelists.

But in today's world, rules intended to protect women from exploitation sometimes can make them vulnerable to discrimination. I am certain, by the way, that this discrimination can work in reverse. But even as women have moved upward in massive numbers in recent decades, they remain too few to benefit much from discriminating against men, even if they wanted to.

Quite the opposite, many have been all the more sensitized as they move up the ranks to how pervasive sexist structures can be -- even on Capitol Hill. An anonymous 2015 National Journal survey of female staffers in Congress, also reported in The Atlantic, found that exclusion from one-on-one time with their male bosses was a "huge impediment to moving up."

Ironically, treating any employee differently on account of gender may be illegal under civil rights laws that Congress has passed. But with so many women equaling and often out-achieving men in colleges and the workplace, smart managers should not need legal action to tell them a simple, durable truth: No-girls-allowed policies and habits are bad for business.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.