“Promotion rates for women lag behind those of men, and the disparity is largest at the first step up to manager — for every 100 women promoted, 130 men are promoted,”
This doesn’t sound right, does it? What could have caused this disparity?
Why are more men getting promoted in comparison to their women counterparts?
One answer — this is because of GLASS CEILING.
Now you would ask — What is Glass Ceiling?
Here it is, in simple language- It is a transparent barrier that hinders professional growth (of women and counting minorities) to higher levels of management.
Even though women have come a long way fighting and progressing in the areas of freedom, rights, education and work professionalism, the statistics still show how far women are lagging behind from holding higher positions in companies and politics.
We have our clear example of glass ceiling where we just saw how U.S was held back from electing their first female president. Well we can’t rightly say that it was only because of glass ceiling, Hillary lost her final battle but definitely it played as one of the roles.
If we look at the statistics, we see that only 5.3% of our Fortune 1000 companies have female CEOs (Forbes 2014). Even more surprisingly women only comprise 14.6% of C-Suite positions and 35% of Middle Management in Fortune 500 companies.
Here are few reasons behind why woman are still not holding C-Suite positions we could analyze into-
1. Societal Expectations: The society still tends to rule over with their set expectations of women where they are expected to put in more hours towards household activities when compared to their male counterparts which eventually hinder their professional growth.
Even though the government in developed countries (and some developing countries) are trying to implement policies (such as maternity leaves, child-care arrangements and flexible hours) that minimizes this inequality, there is still a long way to go until the set societal expectations and rules are overridden.
2. The ‘BOYS CLUB’ Phenomena: Another reason why very few women are seen are seen in the C-suite club is due to this ‘Only Boys’ Club pact which makes it very difficult for women to break into and requires super strong will, patience and courage to make it in.
Now that we know that Glass Ceiling still exists and we have to come across solutions that would start bringing in changes, what would it be? Here’s a compilation we’ve got –
- Cultural change — One obvious solution we would give is to start breaking gender stereotypes our society has raised over the past few years and start accepting that every person(regardless of their gender) deserves to live a fair share of their professional and personal life where responsibilities are shared equally among their counterparts without putting either life on stake. But this will definitely take a longgg time, especially in developing countries let alone underdeveloped ones which is where gender issues need to be discussed aggressively and more awareness needs to be spread.
- Another solution is where women actually start helping other women to excel in their career path and minimize the concept of Queen Bees by making it a responsibility of having women advance professionally and climb the corporate ladder.
- As far as problems like the ‘Boys Club’ phenomena is concerned, these require strategic changes to the organization behavior which emphasizes on equal share of male and female holding management and higher positions and has a gender bias free work culture.
- Most importantly, sometimes there are laws existing which help gender inequality issues but women are not aware of them thus they end up struggling without taking any legal action.
-There’s another place women seem successful at breaking glass ceiling, when playing sports — http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/16/health/team-sports-women-glass-ceiling/
Sources –
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/glass-ceiling-still-exists-53-ceos-women-fortune1000-zack-bell
- Written by Nabeela Amatul
