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Agree? Disagree? Stop sounding off to your computer screen! Instead,
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Sandra Day O'Connor, Elizabeth Dole, and Carly Fiorina are all powerhouses with "a man's job." And that's the problem. O'Connor is the first woman Supreme Court justice, Dole has held the number one position at the Red Cross, and last year, Fiorina was appointed to head up Hewlett-Packard, making her the first woman CEO of a Dow 30 firm.
But female top execs are not the norm. While the proverbial ladder that this trio climbed stretched all the way to the clouds, most women find it a precarious ascent that usually doesn't make it past the third floor.
The glass ceiling may sound like an endearing architectural term or a new form of skylight to the uninitiated, but if you've participated in the corporate world, you'll know what it means. You may have received raves from bosses and plenty of promotions. But if you banked on a spot at the top, chances are, one of the suits will have snared it instead.
The bottom line? The fair sex is not being treated fairly. In a society that spouts egalitarianism and diversity, women and minorities don't get a fair shake. The top dog or dogs are likely to be men. Lest you think this is rabid, male-bashing hooey, chew on these statistics: - Just 7% of Fortune 500's top tech firm officers are women, only 11.2% of whom hold executive jobs; females at these companies earn 75% of men's salaries.
- Women compose 2 percent of the top Fortune 500 companies' top earners.
- While women of color comprise 23% of the country's workforce, a scant 14% hold managerial titles. African-American females make up just 6% of the women with these high-ranking jobs.
- Last year, Catalyst, the New York City women's research organization, reported that merely 11.9% of the corporate officers of the Fortune 500 companies they surveyed are women and of those, only 27.5% have jobs with responsibility, for Catalyst also discovered that just 77 women out of 2,353 were top earners in those companies.
- A recent Business Week study revealed that female graduates of the 20 leading business schools in this country typically earn 12 percent less than their male classmates their first year in the work world.
Although women are gaining ground in some companies and fields (architecture, environmental design, and engineering, for example), they are far more likely to sit on corporate boards than in corner offices. Many women who see the writing on the wall or feel the strain of balancing work and family leave to start their own businesses or find work in more female-friendly environments.
That is not to say that men are not trying and that all organizations have a bias. Gender and race discrimination may no longer be blatant or intentional, but it is systemic. With sexual discrimination lawsuits, political correctness, and genuinely enlightened attitudes, the practices that keep women out of power are subtle.
Why the great divide?
In their Harvard Business Review article "A Modest Manifesto for Shattering the Glass Ceiling," Debra Meyerson and Joyce Fletcher, professors of management at Simmons College's Center for Gender in Organizations, write: "The barriers to women's advancement in organizations today have a relatively straightforward cause. Most organizations have been created by and for men and are based on male experiences."
The authors state that "Even though women have entered the workforce in droves in the past generation, and it is generally agreed that they add enormous value, organizational definitions of competence and leadership are still predicated on traits stereotypically associated with men: tough; aggressive, decisive."
If you're a woman, being aggressive or even tough is usually viewed as a turn-off. Thus, some of the qualities that are respected in men are rejected for women.
"It's a boys' club," said one Los Angeles female media planner. "I don't think women aren't considered capable so much as in order to be promoted to the top ranks you have to be in the inner circle. Women don't tend to be there because men are much more comfortable with men."
Not so fast
To redress the problem of gender discrimination, businesses are reviewing their human resources policies and histories to try and remove artificial barriers to the advancement of female employees as well as minorities. They are looking for the reasons behind the discrepancies and conducting one-on-one interviews with workers to understand their culture. Managers then pinpoint problem patterns and develop initiatives to combat the problems. Today some companies have begun to identify and monitor the career of promising women and minorities to make sure they are not passed over.
In 1989, the U.S. Department of Labor launched the Glass Ceiling Initiative to understand the scope of the problem and have companies identify and resolve glass-ceiling issues. One discouraging finding: the glass ceiling extended far lower than the Labor Department first thought. Instead of zeroing in on the uppermost levels of corporate structure, researchers had to analyze the pipelines to the top.
It found that barriers were due to attitudinal or organizational bias rather than women's credentials or career choices. The report also revealed that minorities stopped gaining professionally at lower levels than women.
Action faction
What can you do to minimize that great divide? Carol Gallagher, a senior principal at American Management Systems Inc., an international business and information technology consulting firm, spoke with 100 senior female executives for her Ph.D. on breaking the glass ceiling. She discovered it takes more than getting good work results to move up.
Among her recommendations are: - Spend less time dispensing business cards on the social circuit and more constructing strategic alliances in and out of your company. One-way is to serve on a volunteer board.
- Be willing to take risks, including failing and learning to be resilient.
- Know how to communicate well and motivate your staff.
- Don't be a perfectionist.
- Be yourself rather than try to cultivate "a man's style" of management.
If you're a manager, take a hard look at who you're promoting and why. The first step in dismantling the glass ceiling is to acknowledge that it exists. Then make sure you're not part of the problem. SALLY ABRAHMS, a self-employed Boston writer, has a standard ceiling in her office but has friends who work in glass ceiling environments.
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Reactions to "Dismantling the Glass Ceiling"
The statistics you quoted are interesting. However, we must remember that they can only be taken in a literal manner and not used to draw causation (i.e. the number of female managers in the corporate world is really low and therefore it must be due to discrimination and male favoritism).
Take for example UC Bekeley. A very high percentage of the student population there are of Asian ethnicity. However, could this be used as a form of justification that the university must therefore be discriminating against Caucasians and other races? The answer is no.
John Bartlett
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