(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which Kindly Dr. Keeping Up turns out to be far more sympathetic to sexual stereotypes than is the federal district court in Washington, D.C., or did you know that already? Dear Doc: What reason can you possibly have for defending oversimple and ''formulaic'' beliefs, to cite two of the defining characteristics of stereotypical thinking according to numerous remaindered dictionaries? Reason enough. Most of the judgments getting bad-mouthed as stereotypes in your average antidiscrimination suit are in fact useful generalizations based on decades of common experience, and that goes double for the judgments about gender lately assailed by the judiciary in Ann B. Hopkins v. Price Waterhouse. Dear Keeping: Assuming arguendo that you are speaking in sequiturs here, please develop the connection between stereotypical thinking and the sex discrimination suit brought by the admittedly profane Ms. Hopkins after she failed to make partner at old P.W. It was the judge who made the connection. In words that will soon reverberate in the U.S. Supreme Court, to which the case is even now levitating, District Judge Gerhard Gesell stated that P.W.'s partners individually and collectively engaged in ''unconscious discrimination'' against Ann. According to Gerhard, they did this by falling prey to sexual stereotypes, among them the formulaic belief that aggressive, harsh, profane, insensitive, and impatient behavior is somehow less usual among women managers than among men. | Dear Keep: Does Gesell acknowledge at any point that stereotypical judgments about male and female behavior might be factually correct? No, the judge is a committed liberal, and one of the ideas he is committed to is that men and women are the same. In cleaving to this perspective, he ignores the wise counsel of Justice William O. Douglas, who pointed out four decades ago in Ballard v. United States that ''the two sexes are not fungible.'' Worse, Gesell has evidently never read The First Five Years of Life, by his father, Arnold Gesell, which has 34 index items under ''sex differences.'' Dear Upkeep: Now tell us how the judge found a violation of the Civil Rights Act in all the aforesaid formulaism. Unfortunately, Gerhard's exposition gets a bit mushy when it becomes time to explain how Price Waterhouse broke the law. He dwells on various arguably sexist remarks made by P.W. partners during the evaluation process -- for example, the fellow who suggested that Ann needed to take a ''course at charm school.'' And yet Gesell nowhere contends that she would have been partnerized but for the stereotyping. He agrees, oddly enough, that she was difficult to deal with and generally lacked the ''interpersonal skills'' required for Price Waterhouse partners. Even more oddly, he agrees that the firm's selection criteria were quite nondiscriminatory. Dear Dr. Up: Your readers can no longer stand the suspense. What did he say was the crime? When you get past the Wheatena, he seems to be saying that stereotyping itself was the crime. The firm should not have a system in which ''outmoded attitudes'' can be expressed in promotion decisions. More specifically: ''Price Waterhouse should have been aware that women being evaluated by male partners might well be victims of discriminatory stereotypes.'' Dear Kindly: So stereotypical comments can somehow get to be violative, even when they don't result in overtly discriminatory behavior? Yes, that seems to be Gesell's perspective and also that of two out of three judges on the appeals court. If the Supremes now go along with this logic, employers could get in trouble just by expressing outmoded thoughts. Or coming out against fungibility.