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The biggest obstacle to women in joining the highest ranks of the business world is a lack of family-friendly policies. That, at least, has been the conventional wisdom in recent years, and it has been embraced by progressive companies that offer flexible schedules or allow people to work from home.

But some researchers are now arguing that the real problem is not the lack of family-friendly policies for mothers, but the surge in hours worked by both women and men. And companies are not likely to want to adopt the obvious solution.

The pressure of a round-the-clock work culture — in which people are expected to answer emails at 11 p.m. and take cellphone calls on Sunday morning — is particularly acute in highly skilled, highly paid professional services jobs like law, finance, consulting and accounting.

Offering family-friendly policies is too narrow a solution to the problem, recent research argues, and can have unintended consequences. When women cut back at work to cope with long hours, they end up stunting their careers. And men aren’t necessarily happy to be expected to work extreme hours, either.

“These 24/7 work cultures lock gender inequality in place, because the work-family balance problem is recognized as primarily a woman’s problem,” said Robin Ely, a professor at Harvard Business School who was a co-author of a recent study on the topic. “The very well-intentioned answer is to give women benefits, but it actually derails women’s careers. The culture of overwork affects everybody.”

The study examined a global consulting firm, which was not named. The firm, where 90 percent of the partners were men, asked the professors what it could do to decrease the number of women who quit and increase the number who were promoted. In exchange, the academics could collect data for their research. The firm was typical in that employees averaged 60 to 65 hours of work a week.

The researchers, who included Irene Padavic of Florida State University and Erin Reid of Boston University, concluded that the problem was not women’s competing demands but that “two orthodoxies remain unchallenged: the necessity of long work hours and the inescapability of women’s stalled advancement.”

The study is being released as part of Harvard Business School’s new gender initiative, led by Ms. Ely, to use empirical evidence to discuss gender issues in business and society.

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Claire Cain Miller is a writer for The Upshot, the Times site about politics, economics and everyday life. She covers gender, work and family as well as technology and the way it changes our lives. Based in the San Francisco bureau, she previously wrote for the business section, covering Google, e-commerce and start-ups, among other Silicon Valley stories. Her articles have also appeared in The Times’s Science, Styles and National sections and in The New York Times Magazine. Ms. Miller is a graduate of Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is from Portland, Ore. and lives with her family in San Francisco. She can be found on Twitter at @clairecm.