Glass Ceiling Essay

Introduction

Ever since it was coined as a term in the 1980s by Gay Bryant, the glass ceiling has had an immense impact on the average working woman as well as diversity in the workplace. To understand its effect and contributions it is necessary to start from the basics by defining the term.

The glass ceiling is a metaphor combining the words glass and ceiling to define an invisible barrier that block women, as well as minorities, from advancing to higher positions due to their gender and/or race. In other words, it does not allow women and minorities to climb up the corporate ladder. Glass is supposed to represent the invisible barrier, and ceiling represents higher position (corporate). Ceiling may also represent a limit to what a woman/minority can achieve. It is also theorized that the more advanced a women/minority achieves, the higher the disadvantages [Boyd, K.], creating more problems in the workplace such as bullying and sexual harassment. It has definitely set women and minorities back from reaching their true potentials and has not only caused mental and internal damage to the person but has also affected them financially. Currently, women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to President Obama in his State of the Union address.

Although there have been improvements of breaking the glass ceiling, especially during the 20th century, and some people claim that the glass ceiling has been abolished, advocates of equal rights movements and research, such as case studies and surveys, define well that the glass ceiling still exist till this day, intentionally or not.

Why does it still Exist?

Even though half of the women population has received higher education [Longman,K., Lafreniere, S], men are ov...

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...Although more than half of the group had no preference, the voters that did have voted more for male. This shows that since the ratio of men to women was uneven, favoring men, there is still some sort of bias in the workplace, unintentionally or intentionally. The effects of that is favoritism.

This type of favoritism results not only in the glass ceiling effect but also the “glass door effect” [Caceres-Rodriguez, R.]. The glass ceiling is not being able to go upward in the organization. Glass door refers to women being “excluded from male dominant occupations”. This results in lower salaries for women and lower authority power.

Another similar concept is tokenism [Caceres-Rodriguez, R.]. This is when a company hires a minority/woman to prevent negative criticism about their work ethics and to give the appearance that their workers are being treated equally.