Glass Ceiling Is a Metaphor

Glass ceiling is a metaphor for the frustrating situation many female workers find themselves in when they aim for higher salaries or promotions to positions of power within an organization. A sign of systematic, institutionalized discrimination, the glass ceiling can refer equally to race as well as gender disparity. Any employee who finds herself staring up at a cadre of coworkers who have similar or even less qualified background experience is looking through a glass ceiling.

The glass ceiling might be experienced as being passed over for promotions by coworkers who are equally qualified as best. When managers assess female members of an organization, gender biases are liable to creep into their thinking. Decisions related to pay increases and promotions would be colored by these biases, thereby constructing the glass ceiling. A related analogy to the glass ceiling is the sticky floor: whereby female workers are stuck to their lower-level positions.

Tesch, Wood, Helwig, and Nattinger (1995) found that among medical school faculty, women physicians are promoted more slowly than men. "Gender differences in rank achieved are not explained by productivity or by differential attrition from academic medicine," (Tesch et al. 1995). Thus, the glass ceiling phenomenon accounts for the disparency. "After a mean of 11 years on a medical school faculty, 59% of women compared with 83% of men had achieved associate or full professor rank, and 5% of women compared with 23% of men had achieved full professor rank," (Tesch et al. 1995).

Some research indicates that the glass ceiling may be a uniquely gender-based phenomenon, and that race does not mitigate being male. Cotter, Hermsen, Ovadia, & Vanneman (2001) found "evidence of a glass ceiling for women, but racial inequalities among men do not follow a similar pattern." A "distinctively gender phenomenon," the glass ceiling does impact the barriers that women experience (Cotter et al. 2001). The glass ceiling is also not just a perception that women have, as ample research substantiates its presence.

Through my observations of which types of people hold positions of power in the business and public sectors, an invisible but real barrier is hindering female upward mobility and the achievement of personal and professional goals. Interestingly, recent research indicates that some women may be creating their own class ceilings. For example, "female managers are more than three times as likely as their male counterparts to underrate their bosses' opinions of their job performance," ("Study: Women create 'their own glass ceiling'" 2009).

Treanor (2007) found that "Women are jumping off the career ladder long before they hit the glass ceiling, raising serious questions about attempts to increase the number of female executives in company boardrooms." In my experience, women do escape the rat race and may indeed underestimate their ability to achieve parity with men in the workplace, in politics, or in any other male-dominated arena. I have second-guessed myself, which is one of the reasons why I have also experienced barriers to promotion.

Therefore, the research does corroborate the core reasons why the glass ceiling exists in the first place: women are taught to undervalue themselves. Females are socialized to be less assertive than men. The game rules are established by men for men, making it extremely difficult for women to retain.