The Glass Ceiling

by Tim Weatherby, Beta Gamma Sigma Communications Director

The “glass ceiling” in corporate America. For more than a decade this phenomenon has been debated and researched, supported and rejected, trumpeted and ignored. Depending on your viewpoint, the glass ceiling either: never existed; remains as strong as ever; is an excuse; is a challenge to be overcome; is an injustice; is a fact of professional life; should never be discussed again; should be a prime corporate topic of discussion; or more likely, a combination of the above.

Few business topics elicit such a strong emotional response as the idea of the glass ceiling. According to the Women Employed website (http://www.womenemployed.org), “In the most general terms, the glass ceiling is the level beyond which qualified women and minorities do not advance in a given workplace. The glass ceiling is comprised of day-to-day practices, management and employee attitudes, and internal systems that operate to the career disadvantage of women and minorities.”

Many recent studies have indicated that while women and minorities have made substantial gains, their place at the top of the corporate ladder is still very thin. A report by Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization that supplies information on women in business, shows that the percentage of women among America’s top executives increased from 8.7 percent in 1995 to 12.5 percent in 2000. However, in the three years since Catalyst has separately tracked women of color (African Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Hispanics), their percentage has not changed from its original 1.3 percent. The same Catalyst report showed that 95.9 percent of corporate “Top Earners” were males.

Other research has indicated that in the case of the “pay gap” at least, there may be other reasons than just discrimination. According to “The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs” in the October 2001 Industrial and Labor Relations Review, authors Marianne Bertrand and Kevin Hallock assert “the unexplained gender compensation gap for top executives was less than 5 percent.” They found that while there was certainly a pay gap – the women in the study earned an average of $900,000 in 1997, while men averaged $1.3 million – there were also good reasons for most of the differences. They found that women were underrepresented in the biggest corporations, which also offered the largest pay packages. Also, they reported that women in the study were five years younger than the men, on average, and had less time in the organization.

While there are many disagreements about the “glass ceiling”, the pure numbers show that men still dominate at the top of the world’s largest organizations. And its not just in the positions of CEO, president and CFO that women seem to be underrepresented. According to Corporate Counsel magazine, women attorneys accounted for only 12.2 percent of general councils in the Fortune 500 in 2002. While this is an improvement over 1999, when only 9.6 percent were females, the article claimed the numbers were still much too low. “While the increase is promising, these numbers look bleak next to another data point: Women have made up at least 40 percent of the nation’s law school classes since the mid-1980s.”

While the scarcity of women in top positions is the focus of most glass ceiling research, the situation with minority groups is very similar. In her book Glass Ceilings and Asian Americans: The New Face of Workplace Barriers, Deborah Woo examines the glass-ceiling phenomenon for several Asian groups. Although seen by some as a “model minority” that is immune from such challenges, Woo says that is not the case. In the higher education world, Woo says that Asians are “virtually absent from high-level administration positions.”

While acknowledging that the glass ceiling exists, Adrian Savage, in The Real Glass Ceiling, says “a far more powerful and common glass ceiling affects men just as much as women.” He contends that most corporations can be described as meritocracies: places where promotions are based on merit. “Achievement and performance are emphasized; advancement is gained through hard work.”

He says that between upper-middle-management and the executive level, the corporate culture “nearly always” shifts to a culture based on power.

“The change is invisible and rarely, if ever, acknowledged openly. To advance further, a worker must play by the new rules even though they’ve never been explained. In fact, the new rules are so important to the way top teams function that even highly talented people who can’t conform will be blocked or eliminated. Though few people talk about it, this is the real glass ceiling.”

Many would counter that argument, because whether the glass ceiling continues to exist – and to what degree – or not, it remains a very controversial and emotional subject.