THE GLASS CEILING

The Glass Ceiling

The Glass Ceiling in Women Workplace

It is also called "the glass ceiling" (English), "sticky floor" (Quebec), "wide sticky", the ''glass ceiling' 'is the invisible barrier that prevents women from reaching the highest levels hierarchy in their work.

The ILO, International Labor Organization, defines it as "invisible barriers created by attitudinal and organizational prejudices that prevent women from reaching the highest responsibilities." The term comes from the fact that in 1987 a group of U.S. researchers looked at the issue of specific barriers that stand in front of female managers and published a landmark book entitled "Breaking the Glass Ceiling". The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board said that "women face specific obstacles, but very subtle, which do not stand before men ... women can see the top of the ladder, but face an invisible barrier when trying to access it." (ILO, 2007)

Women in the Workforce

Kanter

Another important work in the foundation of women's careers was the research presented by Kanter in 1977. By looking at a large organization, Kanter defined how organizational structure shaped the behavior and personalities of the people who worked within it. By looking at three roles—manager, secretary, and wife Kanter emphasized that the dilemmas and choices inherent to the role and the images developed from the role work to further constrain the people. Within the organization, the roles come to serve organizational function and make change difficult (Kanter). Kanter further theorized that the images of masculine and feminine embedded in the roles are neither inherent in the 24 nature of the tasks themselves nor in the characteristics of men and women; they are developed instead by a response to the problems incumbents face in trying to live their organizational lives (Booth, 2003).

Another important finding presented by Kanter (1977) is that a person's location in a work structure, whether it is in a dead-end, invisible, or anonymous position, has more impact on productivity, self-esteem, and competence than background factors or early socialization. She tied this to the role of women as being inextricably bound up within the organizational structure. Kanter believed that differences based on sex fade into the background as the “people-creating, behavior-shaping properties” (p. 9) of organizational locations became clear. In fact, Kanter theorized that behavior described as “typical” in women was not based on psychological attributes or results of socialization but rather in response to the organization's current situation. In this sense, even issues such as discrimination were explained as a consequence of the organizational pressure as much as individual prejudice (Kanter). She believed her theory also undermined the rationale that there was too small a pool of eligible candidates with suitable backgrounds to fill good posts with women or minorities. In fact, her research supported the importance of having sufficient numbers of women and minorities in work situations to avoid the dangers of tokenism (Cardoso, 1999).

Gender Issues in the Workplace

Helgesen's work was among the first to suggest that women, as leaders, should not act like men in order to achieve ...