The word quota system in America is heresy. We’re a meritocracy, where ambition and hard work will pay off eventually. Yet all theories are disproven when studying the place of women in American business and politics.

Photos like this one from last week’s Women in Finance Symposium send a misleading story. Yes, Sheila Bair of the F.D.I.C., Mary Schapiro of the S.E.C., Christina Romer of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Elizabeth Warren of the Troubled Asset Relief Program have risen to assume prominent roles in the finance world, although largely regulatory.

The reality of women in Wall Street has the NYTimes opinionator Blog asking Does Wall Street Need an Estrogen Injection?

There is no rise for women in Wall Street and yes, many of us wonder if the country would even be in this economic mess, if more women complemented men in the business decision-making hierarchy of Wall Street.

It’s time to find out. Gloria Steinem was asked recently her greatest regret about the second-wave women’s movement. Her answer: “that we were so nice.”

Not only are we losing ground on the World Economic Forum’s The Global Gender Gap Report 2009, but a recent Catalyst|Harvard Business Review reports says the ‘gender pipeline’ theory about women’s advancement in business is not true.

Forty years after women marched for equal rights in America, we’re sliding backwards on almost every front — except that today we read that mothers are costing the country billions of dollars a year by not breastfeeding.

I’ve written endless times that American women need to take a wake-up pill on our progress in this country. Whether it’s women in political office or women on boards of director, women won’t advance because America is a very patriarchal country.

American women will sing the same inequality blues 100 years from now. When Conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly persuaded enough Americans that the death knell blow would come to freedom in America if the Equal Rights Amendment was passed, she put all American women in their places.

Many Conservatives want women back home where we belong.

This Catalyst data is really sobering because it surveys the best-educated, the prime examples of America’s new leaders. Those women are nowhere near the corner office. Reality is we’re struggling to hold on to 16% women in Congress. Our top women go nowhere.

Perhaps we need to build a Lilith and Eve arc, turning outr back on the Mayflower heritage, and set sail back to Europe, preferably for Scandinavia.

Read a recap of the HBR ‘broken Pipiline’ research and pdf download at Catalyst and also a good analysis at Read Write Web. Anne