Glass ceiling
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Glass_ceiling".

The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page. (January 2008)

The term glass ceiling refers to situations where the advancement of a qualified person within the hierarchy of an organization is stopped at a lower level because of some form of discrimination, most commonly sexism or racism, but since the term was coined, "glass ceiling" has also come to describe the limited advancement of the deaf, blind, disabled, aged and sexual minorities.¹

This situation is referred to as a "ceiling" as there is a limitation blocking upward advancement, and "glass" (transparent) because the limitation is not immediately apparent and is normally an unwritten and unofficial policy. This invisible barrier continues to exist, even though there are no explicit obstacles keeping minorities from acquiring advanced job positions – there are no advertisements that specifically say “no minorities hired at this establishment”, nor are there any formal orders that say “minorities are not qualified” – but they do lie beneath the surface.² The "glass ceiling" is distinguished from formal barriers to advancement, such as education or experience requirements.

However, this glass ceiling tends to cripple working women the most. This barrier prevents large numbers of women from obtaining and securing the most powerful, prestigious, and highest-grossing jobs in the workforce.³ This barrier makes many women feel as they are not worthy enough to have these high-ranking positions, but also they feel as if their bosses do not take them seriously or actually see them as potential candidates.⁴

History

Sexual discrimination was outlawed in the United States through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the hopes of allowing women to rise in the working world once proper experience has been achieved.

The term "glass ceiling" has been thought to have first been used to refer to invisible barriers that impede the career advancement of women in the American workforce in an article by Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt in the March 24, 1986 edition of the Wall Street Journal.⁵ However, the term was used prior to that; for instance, it was utilized in a March 1984 Adweek article by Gay Bryant. The term glass ceiling was used prior to the 1984 article by two women at Hewlett-Packard in 1979, Katherine Lawrence and Marianne Schreiber, to describe how while on the surface there seemed to be a clear path of promotion, but, in actuality, women seemed to hit a point where they seemed unable to progress beyond. Upon becoming CEO and chairwoman of the board of HP, Carly Fiorina proclaimed that there was no glass ceiling. After her term at HP, she called her earlier statement a "[d]umb thing to say."⁶

However, the term was used by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1991 in response from a study of nine Fortune 500 companies. The study confirmed that women and minorities encountered considerable glass ceiling barriers in their careers; these barriers were experienced earlier in their professions than previously thought.⁷

United States Senator Hillary Clinton used the term glass ceiling in her speech to endorse Senator Barack Obama for President: "And although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it."⁸

The term glass ceiling was originally specifically applied to discrimination against women.

Types of glass ceiling barriers

• Different pay for comparable work.¹
• Sexual, ethnic, racial, religious discrimination or harassment in the workplace
• Lack of family-friendly workplace policies

Sexism and glass ceiling effects - the gender wage gap

One of the major indicators that serves to demonstrate a perceived inequality between males and females is the controversy behind a supposed gender wage gap. This gap is the difference in both the wages and earnings between males and females who have equivalent job titles, training experience, education, and professions. In most circumstances, women are paid less than men when all of these factors are comparable.⁹ A comparison frequently cited is that women make 75.3 cents on the dollar to men, which is derived from statistics maintained by the United States Census Bureau from 2003, relating specifically to an across-the-board comparison of year-round full-time workers. However, an April, 2005 article titled "Gender Wage Gap Is Feminist Fiction" from the libertarian Independent Women's Forum states, "A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98% of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job."

Women’s labor force participation has steadily increased since World War II; additionally, the pay differential between men and women’s earnings has generally decreased over the years. These progressions can most likely be attributed to women’s rising levels of education, women’s lowered fertility rate, and men’s declining opportunities to obtain well-paid manufacturing jobs. According to the United States Census Bureau of 2003, women’s earnings have made a 9% increase since 1990, compared to men’s 4.9% increase. However, even though women have made substantial gains in the workforce, discrepancies continue to exist and women are still far from being equal with men. In 2000, women’s median income was $28,820, while men’s median income was $39,020.¹⁰ A gender wage gap still continues to endure.

Furthermore, the gross national figures conceal the fact that men hold the highest paying, most prestigious, and most powerful jobs in the occupational structure; this accounts for much of the imbalance with men and women’s incomes.¹¹ This is referred to as occupational segregation. Men tend to be highly concentrated in the top professions, such as supervisors, managers, executives, and production operators. On the other hand, women tend to be over-represented in the lowest-ranking and lowest paid professions in the workforce, such as secretaries, sales associates, teachers, nurses, and child care providers. As a result, occupations become “sex typed” as either being specifically male or female jobs.¹² The stereotypically male-characterized occupations, in which at least 60-75% of the workers are males, are more highly paid than occupations in which 60-75% of the jobholders are women.¹³ This segregation of women into less-prestigious and lower-ranked jobs also decreases a woman’s chance of being promoted, as well as the chance of having any type of power over others. Moreover, occupational segregation reduces women’s access to insurance, benefits, and pensions.¹⁴ Occupational segregation is a vicious cycle that successfully continues to put women down.

Males not only have superior statuses than women between jobs, but also within the jobs themselves. Women are concentrated into the lower-ranked and lower-paid occupations within a given profession. If women are in management positions, they are more likely to be in personnel than in marketing professions; the averages salaries of each are $48,048 and $56,940 per year, respectively. Another example occurs within the medical field. Female doctors are much more likely to be heavily constricted in the family practice or pediatric specialties, which average about $130,000 and $126,000 per year, respectively. However, men have a higher percentage of becoming surgeons and highly specialized medical practitioners, who tend to average $240,000 or more per year.¹⁵

This gender wage gap is present within all realms of the workforce – blue collar, managerial, and professional occupations. Only 16% of the top executive positions in America’s largest corporations and enterprises are held by women.¹⁶ Additionally, the median weekly income of full-time working women is only 70.5% of full-time working men. This statistic tends to hold true across all fields of work.¹⁷ This gender imbalance in occupations occurs to some degree because women are more likely than men to be newcomers in many fields; therefore, they lack the primacy and the increased pay that comes with seniority.¹⁸

The gendered inequalities are often embedded within the social hierarchy and this affects how women and men are perceived in leadership roles. Different traits are ascribed to females when compared to males that often color the selection process with unfounded bias. If a female does have other traits aside from the gendered traits that she is believed to possess, then she is viewed negatively.¹⁹ For example, in a study conducted by Thomas-Hunt and Phillips (2004) they found that when women possessed expertise they were actually viewed as less influential by others. However, expertise was positive for males. Also, female led groups were less productive than male led groups even though the women held expertise in the area just like males. Therefore, possessing expertise is not viewed as positively as it is for males. This also suggests that lack of skills is not the only reason why women are not deemed worthy of leadership roles.²⁰

Lyness and Heilman (2006) found that in a study conducted with 448 upper-level employees that women were less likely to be promoted than males, and if they were promoted they had stronger performance ratings than males. However, performance ratings were more strongly connected to promotions for women than men. This suggests that woman had to be highly impressive to be considered eligible for leadership roles, whereas this was not the case for men.²¹

Women are more likely to choose jobs based on factors other than pay, for instance: health care and scheduling that can be managed with the duties of primary care of children for which women are still overwhelmingly responsible, and thus they may be less likely to take jobs that require travel or relocation or jobs that are hazardous. On average, women take more time off and work fewer hours, often due to the unequal distribution of childcare labor, domestic labor, medical needs specific to women, and other family issues that tend to fall to a woman's responsibility per the gender roles assigned by society.²² The ending result of women’s extensive obligation to attend to responsibilities of the home and children is that their wages plummet. Family demands have a downward pull on women’s earnings as they proceed throughout their life course. The earnings gap tends to widen considerably when men and women are in their early to mid-thirties; the gap reaches the widest point when men and women are in their fifties.²³

Another perspective on the gender wage gap comes from a 2008 research study by Judge and Livingston.²⁴ They investigated the relationship(s) between gender, gender role orientation, and labor marker earnings. The study did not specifically look at the gender wage gap, but focused more on the impact that the interaction between gender role orientation (people’s beliefs about what occupations are considered suitable and appropriate for males and females) and gender has on earnings. The researchers suggested that the gender wage gap cannot fully be explained through economic factors, offering that underlying psychological components and attitudes account for some of the difference. They found that while traditional gender roles were positively connected to earnings, that gender significantly predicted the amount and direction of this relationship. For instance, traditional gender role orientation was positively related with earnings for males, providing them with strong earnings. Meanwhile, traditional gender role orientation was slightly negatively associated with earnings for females, providing them weaker earnings. This suggests that men who have traditional male-female attitudes about working are rewarded in the workplace for seeking to maintain the social order, while women were neither rewarded nor punished. In general, the study indicated that even though gender role beliefs are beginning to become less traditional for men and women, traditional gender role orientation continues to intensify the gender wage gap.

Reverse glass ceiling

A new phenomenon, known as the "reverse glass ceiling", has been taking shape in America over the past few years. More and more men have started their careers in female-dominated industries, such as nursing, paralegal, travel and childcare. Many have been discriminated against because of this. Some experts question whether it actually exists because it's^clarify still infantile in growth.²⁵ Some others call this concept the "glass escalator" and describe it as the rapid advancement of men into positions of authority within female-dominated occupations.²⁶

Variations and related terms

• Bamboo Ceiling - The exclusion of Asian-Americans from executive and managerial roles on the basis of subjective factors such as "lack of leadership potential" or "inferior communication ability" where the East Asian-American candidate has superior objective credentials such as Ivy League credentials (in comparison to their white counterparts with only state university credentials).²⁷ For example, research shows that there are a decent number of partners at leading prestigious law firms in the United States who did not attend top notch law schools. However, you will seldom find an East Asian American partner of a leading law firm who did not attend a "Top 14 Law School" (according to the US News ranking).
• Concrete Ceiling – This is a term used to describe the type of barrier minority woman encounter. Caucasian women may face the glass ceiling in the workforce, but be able to break through it from time to time; however, minority women’s glass ceiling tends to be more solid and unyielding. This ‘concrete ceiling’ is due to minority women facing both issues of sexism and racism which intensifies their obstructions in advancing within the labor market.²⁸
• Expatriate Glass Ceiling - After breaking through the first level of the glass ceiling, many women are beginning to face an additional barrier. This is a term used to describe this second level of obstruction which prevents women in managerial positions from receiving foreign management assignments, projects, and experiences that is becoming increasingly more important for promotion into the upper-level managerial positions as documented by Insch, McIntyre, and Napier.²⁹
• Glass Closet - The exclusion of openly gay men and women from certain jobs, especially in the media.
• Glass elevator (or glass escalator) - The rapid promotion of men over women, especially into management, in female-dominated fields such as nursing.^{citation needed}Men in these fields are promoted with ease – they actually have to struggle not to advance due to facing invisible pressures and expectations to move up from where they currently are. This is based on traditional gender roles and stereotypes that men are expected to be in the chief roles, while women are to be in the subordinate positions. Therefore, in the fields where men are less common, they receive differential treatment that favors them to exert their authority and control in the workplace.³⁰
• Glass cliff - A situation wherein someone has been promoted into a risky, difficult job where the chances of failure are higher.
• Celluloid ceiling, referring to the small number of women in top positions in Hollywood, as documented by Lauzen (2002) and others.
• Sticky Floor - refers to women who are trapped in low-wage, low mobility jobs in state and local government.³¹
• Sticky Ladder - A term used to describe women's struggle to reach the top of the corporate ladder. This term describes the theory that women are not incapable of reaching the top; they just get "stuck" on the middle rungs of the ladder.

The effect has also inspired a musical, bearing the same name. "Glass Ceiling" (2006), written by Bret VandenBos and Alex Krall, examined and parodied the idiosyncrasies of both males and females in the corporate workplace.³²

See also

• Affirmative Action
• Employment
• Equal pay for women
• Feminism
• Feminization of poverty
• Gender role
• Gender equality
• Glass cliff
• Masculism
• Racism
• Sexism
• Social equality
• Stained-glass ceiling

Notes

Refernces

• Fox, Mary F. and Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber. 1984. Women at Work. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.
• Giele, Janet Z. and Leslie F. Stebbins. 2003. Women and Equality in the Workplace. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc.
• Hesse-Biber, Sharlene N. and Gregg L. Carter. 2005. Working Women in America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Insch, Gary S., Nancy McIntyre, and Nancy K. Napier. 2008. “The Expatriate Glass Ceiling: The Second Layer of Glass.” Journal of Business Ethics 83:19-28.
• Judge, Timothy A. and Beth A. Livingston. 2008. “Is the Gap More Than Gender? A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Gender Role Orientation, and Earnings.” Journal of Applied Psychology 93:994-1012.
• Nevill, Ginny, Alice Pennicott, Joanna Williams, and Ann Worrall. 1900. Women in the Workforce: The Effect of Demographic Changes in the 1990s. London: The Industrial Society.

External links

• Dealing with the Glass Ceiling
• Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 250 Films of 2006 at Movies by Women
• Report of the Glass Ceiling Commission (PDF format)
• Read Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports regarding Pay Equity