GLASS CEILING

The Glass Ceiling: Are Women Treated Differently?

The Glass Ceiling: Are Women Treated Differently?

Introduction

The term glass ceiling refers to barriers that prevent women and minority groups from advancing in their occupations. It is dubbed a “glass” ceiling because those who encounter it are aware of the customs and discriminatory practices that impede their upward mobility. In essence, they can “see” what's above them, but find it difficult to “shatter” the barrier. Many complain that they are better qualified than those above them. In some cases, those below the glass ceiling actually trained their future supervisors. The earliest known coinage of the phrase was by Henry Bradford Smith in 1932, in a review article about geometry and inductive reasoning. It appears to have been given its current meaning by a 1984 Adweek magazine article and passed into the common vernacular shortly thereafter (United Nations, 1995).

Skilled positions and management have been dominated by white males since colonial times, but social changes after World War II have challenged that hegemony. Both the civil rights and women's movements stimulated important legal changes that opened society to those once marginalized. The 1963 Equal Pay Act stipulated that those who do the same job must receive identical pay. The 1964 Civil Rights Act tore down most of the remaining racist Jim Crow barriers that excluded people of color, and Title VII of that bill extended civil-rights protections to women. Affirmative action programs forced employers to consider women and minorities when hiring and promoting staff. Other protective labor legislation mandated further changes.

By the 1960s, women and minority groups could be found in many occupations historically considered reserved for white males. It soon became apparent, though, that the penetration of said groups into the workplace was shallow, and groups complained that tokenism circumvented substantive social change. This was especially apparent at the upper levels of work. A 1986 survey of Fortune 1000 industrial firms and Fortune 500 service corporations revealed that 95 percent of all senior managers were male and that 97 percent of them were white. Of the remaining 5 percent who were female, 95 percent of them were also white. These percentages have changed only slightly since then, despite the fact that by the mid-1990s, 45 percent of the workforce was female and a mere one-third was male and white (Epstein, Fuchs, Robert, Bonnie and Gever, 1995).

The 1991 Civil Rights Act established the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission to study ways to redress the imbalances, but has had only modest success. A 1996 report indicated that female managers and chief executives work as many hours as their male counterparts, but receive on average only two-thirds as much compensation (Burbridge, 1994). As of 1999, women workers averaged seventy-four cents for every dollar earned by males. Studies further indicate that women and minorities usually only advance in large firms by adopting the management styles of entrenched white males. The record is better with smaller firms where women controlled some 40 percent of small businesses by the year ...