On the reducibility of characteristic varieties

We present a result which can be used for stratifications with conical singularities to deduce that a perverse sheaf (in particular, an intersection homology sheaf) has reducible characteristic variety, given a hypothesis on the monodromy of the vanishing cycles local system of a stratum. We apply it to explain most of the examples currently known where SS(IC(X)) is reducible for X a Schubert variety in a flag variety.