Glass Ceiling and Gender Barriers for Professional Women

Introduction

The delineation of the sexes is clearly established in society and impressed upon people's minds. The man is to be the breadwinner, and the woman is the nurturer of children and keeper of the home. Yet over the last two decades, professional women have entered the workforce and now account for almost half of the American labor force. Half of them occupy managerial and professional specialty positions, about half come from medical and law schools, and an increasing number serve as corporate officers. But few of them hold line jobs, receive wages comparable to those of male employees, rank among top earners, or are appointed to board seats.

The majority of high-powered women employees leave their positions mainly because of dissatisfaction with job growth and advancement, a lack of flexibility, bias and discrimination, and discomfort in their work environment. They are also generally less comfortable with promoting themselves and using their knowledge to become more effective. Likewise, their careers are generally evaluated in connection with the characteristics of their relationships with men. When women try to ascend the corporate management ladder, they are hindered by gender segregation, which is deeply reinforced by society. Statistics clearly reveal this condition.

In her work entitled Contextual and Cognitive Procedural Justice: Perceptions in Promotion Barriers for Women, Mary Lemons (2003) attempts to find out why talented women in the workplace continue to quit their posts in large numbers and what companies can do to retain them.

Review of Literature

Ellen R. Auster (2001) offers a framework of factors that affect mid-career satisfaction of professional women and delineates the main demographic, career, organizational, job, and stress factors in her work entitled Professional Women's Mid-Career Satisfaction.

What creates barriers to the careers of professional women despite their excellent performance and the encouragements offered and guaranteed by the law is the subject of Charlene Marmer Solomon's (2000) work entitled Cracks in the Glass Ceiling.

How companies can effectively deal with the rapid turnover of talented professional women despite culture change, flexible scheduling, and leadership training is discussed in the article "Are Women Responsible for the Glass Ceiling?" published by USA Today (2000).

Miguel Moya (2000) endeavors to establish the connection between women's career salience and gender discrimination and the characteristics of their relationships with men in his work entitled Close Relationships, Gender and Career Salience.

Findings and Analysis

Mia Hultin (2000) explores how gender stereotypes influence positions, staffing, and compensation in organizations in her work entitled Wages and Unequal Access to Organizational Power: An Empirical Test of Gender Discrimination.

Title VII on Equal Employment Opportunity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that gender cannot be the basis for refusing to hire women or for limiting, segregating, or classifying employees, refusing to refer them, expelling them from organizational membership, discriminating against them, determining their compensation, or extending preferential treatment at work.

The 1998 Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that women represented 46% of the US labor force and that half of them occupied managerial and professional specialty positions (Solomon 2000). It also reported that women comprised approximately 46% of law school classes and 42% of medical school graduates, that almost 12% of corporate officers were women, but that only 3.3% held top-earner jobs, only 6.8% had line jobs and board seats, and that Fortune companies with women on their boards had increased by 21% (Solomon).

Women, especially professional women, now have a commanding corporate presence, and many of them seek advancement in the careers they have chosen and excelled in. But they are met with seemingly overwhelming odds, mostly connected to their gender and gender stereotypes. One such obstacle involves career salience. Men's career salience is more independent of the characteristics of their relationships than that of women, which suggests that men can take their careers for granted regardless of the characteristics of their relationships with women (Moya 2000). By comparison, women's careers are newer and more closely tied to their personal relationship characteristics with men. Women confront problems because of differences in socialization and in the attitudes, role expectations, behaviors, and sanctions comprising those attitudes. Women's behavior in the workplace, as well as their career advancement, is also seen as more influenced by their own attitudes — including assumptions about having less financial responsibility for the family income than men. Parenthood, for example, was seen to relate to lower career salience among women more than among men, as does the strength of their relationship. This implies that women's career salience is judged according to their partner's characteristics — such as educational attainment, employment, and expressivity — while men's career salience is not judged in relation to their partners' characteristics (Moya).

Another barrier involves wage levels for professional women seeking career advancement. Women who work in organizations where the majority of managers are men receive lower wages than women in organizations with a stronger female representation in the power structure (Hultin 1999). Gender stereotypes tend to become embedded in organizational arrangements and procedures, influencing how positions are defined, staffed, and priced. Findings showed that these practices became incorporated into the organizational structure and institutionalized. In this setting, wage differences could appear to be legitimate and thus influence compensation levels and reward distribution even after the original circumstances for those differences had disappeared or changed. Baron and Pfeffer (as quoted in Hultin 1999) noted that dominant social and demographic groups tended to distinguish themselves by creating systems of detailed positions and standings that command higher rewards. Female managers were also found to show less motivation than their male counterparts to challenge institutionalized discriminatory practices. Studies revealed that in organizations with few or no women in positions of power, gender becomes a prominent category — one that disadvantages women at lower organizational levels, as those women lack the means to change criteria for success while men possess the resources but are generally unmotivated to modify gender-biased treatment. The scarcity of women in senior positions reflected the disadvantage they confronted organizationally. Female organizational leaders, however, were found to be more inclined to participate in efforts to establish employment equality (Hultin).

Male managers were found to be disinclined to set aside gender discriminatory practices, and female managers themselves did not necessarily consider women's interests in general to be their own individual interests (Lemons 2003). Organizational justice perceptions were generally products of individual cognitive processes, which developed in response to cultural expectations. This explains why some individuals within an organization perceive a particular situation as unfair while others do not. Research showed that while women appeared to receive more promotions than men, women continued to hold significantly lower positions overall. Gender segregation became a problem specifically when women tried to enter upper management posts, which were male-dominated. As women became visible in those higher posts, members of the dominant group expressed entrenched gender stereotypes. Gender segregation develops when decision-makers apply gender-based standards in hiring or promoting. Diversity training would help in changing existing stereotypes concerning male and female employees and the roles assigned to them, thereby improving perceptions of justice in promotion decisions (Lemons).

The 88th US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII on Equal Employment Opportunity outlawed the use of gender as a basis for refusing to hire or dismiss an employee, referring that employee for a particular position, fixing wages, applying a merit system or preferential treatment, or for a labor organization to exclude or expel an employee, limit, segregate, classify, or otherwise discriminate against that employee. The Act created an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce its provisions.

The majority of mid-career women worldwide were leaving their corporate positions not for home but for other companies or their own businesses, driven by dissatisfaction with their mid-career conditions (Auster 2001). These conditions included poor job growth and advancement, lack of flexibility, sex bias, and discrimination. Mid-career was identified as the point where organizational practices and personal life responsibilities collide and where women make the critical decision of whether to stay, move to another organization, or start their own business. An organization could incorporate micro-level factors into its structure and career context to address this issue. Individual, family, and job design characteristics, as well as stress and satisfaction factors, networking, mentoring, flexible jobs, and human resource policies, would all contribute to better understanding and responding to the mid-career satisfaction needs of professional women (Auster).

The invisible barrier known as the glass ceiling, which limits female achievers' bids for career advancement, was not of their own making (Goodson as quoted in USA Today 2000). Yet women with similar or comparable education, experience, and achievement still earn less than men. A missing link — identified as the absent ingredient between performance and a just payoff — was women's own ability to comfortably and consistently draw attention to the contributions they made. Findings from a study of 322 male and female executives showed that women were less comfortable promoting themselves than men. Many still believed that self-promotion by women was socially unacceptable and that hard work alone would not elevate them to the same level as men. Women were also found to be "over-preparers" who wanted their work to be technically correct but failed to bring this sense of accuracy and care to the attention of influential individuals in the organization. Goodson found that even women who understood the importance of visibility management in the modern workplace were often reluctant to translate their knowledge and skills into effective self-presentation. While acknowledging these women's competence, Goodson argued that they needed to learn to help themselves — to shine on their own terms in today's competitive work settings. He also placed partial blame on career women themselves for failing to effectively support one another, observing that women who reached the top often failed to reach back to those following them (USA Today).

About half of the US workforce consisted of women, and about half of those were in managerial and professional specialty positions (Solomon 2000). More than half of those holding college, master's, and doctoral degrees and almost half of law school students and medical school graduates were women. Almost 12% of corporate officers were also women, a number that had risen 37% from 1995 levels and continued to increase. Yet statistics showed that only 3.3% held top-earner positions despite a 175% increase; only 6.8% held line jobs with profit-and-loss or direct client responsibility; and only 8.5% occupied board seats among Fortune's top 1,000 corporations, while the share of Fortune 500 companies with at least one female board director had increased by 21%. Companies wishing to retain top-performing women should ensure individual compensation equity and access to promotion, and should take a number of concrete steps. These included increasing flexible work arrangements such as part-time and alternative schedules and workplaces; allowing women to customize the pace of their career advancement; ensuring their representation in key functions such as sales; identifying those with entrepreneurial abilities and interests that predict business success; recognizing their expressed bottom-line contributions; examining their representation in line functions; and recruiting female entrepreneurs to corporate boards and senior line positions (Solomon).

The prospects of career advancement for talented women were found to be thwarted on account of their gender. Despite the demand for great talent everywhere, organizational conditions that would encourage the mobility and retention of talented women — as well as men who wished to perform their best — did not appear to be widespread (Solomon 2000).

In the face of clearly delineated gender roles in society, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by the 88th US Congress to ensure that gender would not be a basis for refusing to hire or dismiss, limit, classify, segregate, or otherwise perform gender-conditioned acts against women. It was seemingly designed to prepare the way for professional women's entry into the workforce, especially the entrance and ascent of talented women into managerial and corporate positions. Today, statistics show that these women comprise almost half of the entire American workforce, half of all managerial and specialty positions, and half of law school and medical school graduates. Yet few women hold line jobs and top-earning posts, receive wages comparable to men's, or occupy board seats (Auster 2001, Solomon 2000).

Research showed that professional women's career salience depended on the characteristics of their relationships with men, while men's career salience was independent of the characteristics of their relationships with women (Moya 2000). This trend reflected that professional women's value was still linked to their stereotyped role as men's subdued partners or supporters.