GLASS CEILING
Sociologyindex, Books on Glass Ceiling Hypothesis, Sociology Books 2011
In the analysis of women in the work place, this concept is useful for describing the invisible barriers that block the promotion of women.
It refers to barriers that are not explicit, but are inherent in the social organization and social relationships of the workplace.
For example, women may find their corporate careers obstructed because they are excluded from the recreational and social associations created by male fellow workers and lack the social contacts that are important in gaining status and recognition.
Glass Ceiling Hypothesis
“While, as a metaphor, the glass ceiling conveys a strong
connotation . . . when the glass ceiling is actually measured by the mobility of
individuals between different hierarchical levels, one recognizes that it has different
levels of severity, or closedness, and thus the analyst can investigate the phenomenon as
a matter of degree rather than as a dichotomy.” Yamagata.
The salience of the 'glass ceiling' metaphor in public discussions of gender inequality,
has given rise to a substantial body of quantitative research systematically exploring the
extent and variations in the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling hypothesis is not a special
hypothesis for any particular country, but a general hypothesis about the patterns of
gender discrimination in organizational hierarchies.
The glass ceiling hypothesis could change with time because the labor force participation
rates of women have been increasing rapidly in recent years and the proportion of all jobs
that are located within managerial hierarchies has also been increasing. By far the
biggest bias in estimates of gender-specific promotion rates from cross-sectional data is
likely to be generated by the very rapid rate of increase in women’s labor force
participation and historic legacies of past discrimination.
Gender-based discrimination in promotions is not generally present across all levels of hierarchy but is more intense at higher levels. Empirically, it has been established that the relative rates of women being promoted to higher levels compared to men declines with the level of the hierarchy.
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Occupational and organizational sex segregation, even self-segregation, may reflect
various forms of gender discrimination in the society at large, but the mechanisms
involved are different from those identified with the glass ceiling.
Women are more likely to work part-time than are men, and part-time workers are less
likely to be promoted than are full-time workers, not because of gender-specific reasons
but because of the organizational costs of promoting part-time managers.
Similarly, women are more likely to work for the state than are men, and there are
proportionately fewer upper-level managers in state organizations than in private
corporations.
Some of the apparent gender gap in authority would be the result of the distribution of
women into work settings with fewer managerial opportunities rather than any
gender-specific obstacles to their acquiring managerial positions within their workplaces.
The glass ceiling effect at the middle level of managerial hierarchies could be higher
than at higher levels. Removing gender-related obstacles to getting into middle hierarchy
would appear to be a more pressing task than removing obstacles to promotions in the upper
reaches of authority structures.
There is a critical difference between women’s struggles against gender inequality in
the liberal democratic and social democratic political traditions. In liberal democratic
politics, the pivotal focus of struggle is equal rights, and this leads to policies
designed to eliminate various forms of discrimination that affect individual opportunities
in the market. In social democratic politics, the core issue is satisfaction of needs,
which in a capitalist market economy leads to policies directed at the decommodified
provision of services and political regulation of labor market transactions. The result is
that much less political energy has been devoted to ending gendered discrimination in
employment practices, which may help explain both a larger overall gender gap in authority
and the presence of glass ceiling effects within hierarchies.
Recruitment into levels is not simply by promotion from the next lower level within an
organization or even by recruitment of people from outside the organization who were in
the equivalent next lower level in some other organization. There are many lateral moves
within and across organizations as well as recruitment of people into middle and even
upper-level positions who did not previously occupy any hierarchical position. The
advancement process within managerial hierarchies is thus much less ordered than the
movement through levels of an educational system.
Movement can be downward as well as upward. Especially in the context of movement across
organizations—for example, movement from the upper levels of a small firm to the
middle levels of a large corporation—this is probably not a rare event.
Third, people may voluntarily exit organizations and leave the hierarchy before
reaching the highest level they could have attained if they had stayed in their jobs. If
women voluntarily leave in this way at higher rates then men, then the distribution of men
and women across levels may simulate a glass ceiling where none exists.
Historical Legacies
At any point in time, the actual distribution of men and women across
hierarchical levels either within a specific organization or in the society at large will
depend not simply on the currently existing allocation rules, whatever those might be, but
on the legacies of past allocation rules and past gender-specific labor force
participation rates.
There is every reason to believe that gender-related promotion practices have undergone at
least some recent historical change, and of course, there have been massive increases in
women’s labor force participation. Distributional patterns that may look like a glass
ceiling could thus simply be by-products of past discrimination and past lower levels of
women’s labor force participation rather than current practices. Discrimination could
in principle have been completely eliminated in organizations, or at least differential
discrimination across levels could have been eliminated, and yet therewould still be high
concentrations of women in lower levels of the hierarchy. There simply has not been enough
historical time to allow these new cohorts of women to be promoted up to the highest
levels they will eventually achieve.
Unmeasured differences in employee quality
Even if it were the case that we could solve all of the structural complexities
of promotions, the fact that men and women at a given level of an authority hierarchy may
have different unmeasured qualities may confound any inferences drawn directly from
differential promotion rates. These quality differences could work either to make it seem
that a glass ceiling is present when one does not really exist or to mask the presence of
a glass ceiling. If, for example, it were the case that men on average have certain
qualities that are important for managerial promotions but that are not captured by easily
observable measures of individual attributes (e.g., willingness to sacrifice intimate
personal relations for careers), and if these attributes become increasingly important as
one moves up a hierarchy, then increasing promotion advantages for men relative to women
might
simply reflect the increasing salience of this personal attribute rather than intensified
gender discrimination per se. Women with these attributes might have the same promotion
probabilities as men; it is simply less likely that women will actually have these
attributes.
Gender differences in unmeasured personal attributes, however, could also mask a glass
ceiling. Suppose the promotion rate advantage of men relative towomen is constant across
levels of the hierarchy. In such a situation, it might be expected that women are being
selected for promotion on more exacting criteria than men. In effect, women face a more
intense competitive selection process than men since it is harder for them to be promoted.
In such a context, the average quality of women managers compared to men managers might be
expected to increase more rapidly as one moves up the hierarchy. If relative promotion
probabilities of men are constant in this situation, this might nevertheless still be
consistent with the relative obstacles faced by women steadily increasing: It would become
progressively harder for a woman with given personal qualities to get promoted relative to
a man with those same qualities.
Extracts from: THE GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS - A Comparative Study of the United States,
Sweden, and Australia - JANEEN BAXTER University of Tasmania and ERIK OLIN WRIGHT
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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