Women and the Glass Ceiling
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Everyone knows what a "ceiling" is: it's the top of the room, the upper limit, the highest point to which something can rise. In the business world, in the best capitalist sense of economic opportunity, there are no ceilings - one is free to rise to the highest heights one's abilities allow one to scale. However, as Adam Smith failed to take into account when he wrote The Wealth of Nations two hundred some-odd years ago, ability is often compromised by illogical barriers to opportunity. True, capitalism is based upon the idea that businesspeople inherently seek self-advantage, throwing up barriers to competitors, but that idea includes the premise that there is an equilibrium of interests that is generally fair to all in society (Lekachman & Van Loon, 1981, pp. 42-43). Smith and most idealists of the businessplace do not consider fully that social prejudices will create a "glass ceiling" on opportunities available to those of ability who are of minority status - particularly women. 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 workforce, women, account for less than 10% 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.
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quote Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (Gingrich, 1995, pp. 30); a time wherein "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 until blue in the face whether this golden age ever existed (vis-a-vis pioneer women, women of letters, etc.), but the fact remains that in American society there is 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, 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 hav
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2661
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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