Groups Affected by the Glass Ceiling

The glass ceiling is a term coined only recently, and generally applies to women. It relates to the statistical phenomenon wherein almost half of the American work force, women, account for less than 10 percent of the upper management in the business world. Specifically, the glass ceiling that women apparently face is that, no matter their ability or accomplishment, male-dominated corporate America is unprepared to let them rise above an artificial, sub-executive level of management.

Glass ceilings affect other groups, minorities, many of whom have a long history of participation in the business world, but have been denied executive position on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity. Women, however, are the group most affected by glass ceilings.

The glass ceiling started very low in the early days of U.S. economic activity. Prior to World War II, women were restricted to a few labor-intensive areas of the business world. Farming at the family level of production, of course, has always employed women as partners with their mates; pioneer America was a more equitable workplace in that respect. By contrast, the urban work force, growing out of the male-dominated guild and craft associations into Industrial Age entities, did not become amenable to the female presence until this century. The garment industry was the primary field into which women, usually immigrant piece-workers, were shunted. World War I opened more doors and, despite the ravages of the Great Depres

House Newt Gingrich (Gingrich, 1995, pp. 30); a time when "patriotic family values" dominated American life. This traditionalist perspective is male-oriented: it expects the female to be the representative of hearth and home - not a competitor in the workplace. One can argue whether this golden age ever existed, but American society retains an ingrained hostility to the concept of women in positions of workplace dominance (Ginzberg & Yohalem, 1973, pp. 6-7). This hostility runs deep - and is not gender-bound. As Mirabelle Morgan, Susan Faludi and Camille Paglia have demonstrated in a series of popular anti-feminist non-fiction books, women run fifty-fifty with men in their ambiguity on the subject of whether or not a woman's place of dominance should be in the home - or elsewhere. For men, of course, the stakes are obvious: the rise of women to positions of non-domestic power clearly implies a lowering of the male status. For women, the issue is much more complex. Concepts such as the "Mommy Track" vie with Ability, Ambition and the "Biological Clock" to make difficult the position of a woman who wants to have a serious, non-domestic career. Popular journals are filled with the debate, ranging from "You CAN Have It