It's not hard to see where the confusion between sexy, smart and powerful comes from.

Look at any "power woman" depicted on TV in recent years and there's a good chance she'll come packaged up with a five-inch pair of heels.

The formidable Claire Underwood of House of Cards would rather clobber Frank over the head with one of her towering Stilettos than venture outside her White House bedroom without them (in fact she'd quite likely clobber Frank over the head anyway, but that's another topic).

The Good Wife's Alicia Florrick draws her trademark courtroom flair from a carefully curated uniform, of which heels - at least three inches - are a central tenet.

It's hard to imagine Olivia Pope's power strut in Scandal without the presence of her gravity-defying shoes (although actress Kerry Washington prefers flip-flops in real life).

These women's heels aren't an incidental aspect of their power and status, they're central to it. It would be difficult to picture them sauntering around, scoring goals and pulling verbal punches, without them.

"I think you should always wear a heel," Dan Lawson, the costume designer behind The Good Wife, notes. "I know women hesitate about that because they're comfortable in flats, but I think you need to have a comfortable high heeled shoe, something that says strength. It changes your posture. It says, 'I'm really together.'"

As a 5'1'' person whose feet are too fat to swagger in anything above the measliest of wedges, I'm bemused about the starring role shoes play in these women's professional standing. It's like the sheer amount of inches in those heels are fuel to their swagger.

“Heels have nothing to do with power in the workplace. Why do we pretend they do?”