Still seeking a glass slipper: there are reasons, good, bad, and neutral, why there are fewer women than men at the top of American institutions

National Review, Dec 14, 1992 by George Gilder

LEAN BACK in your chair and look up--the ceiling is opaque, isn't it? At least it is for most of us mere men. I would like to play for the Celtics, run the software division at IBM, write eighty best-sellers like Agatha Christie, be elected to the Senate like Barbara Mikulski, summon God and make Him come like Leanne Payne. I would like to be able to debate, write numberless books, and lead national movements to victory, as Phyllis Schlafly does, while raising five children. I ogle upward at these paragons and am baffled. I do not have the slightest idea how they do it. The ceiling is not glass.

Actually, I think the problem is that for the feminists, the ceiling is a mirror. They look up at the pinnacles of the economy and see themselves in power. The fact is that in a competitive economy, nearly all high-level jobs demand singular gifts, special experience, high ambition, bold willingness to take risks. For a particular slot, there is usually not a broad selection of people available. Often, judging from my experience with small high-technology businesses, there is no one available of either sex. Headhunters earn thousands of dollars by delivering one suitable head. And each year, these high-tech firms account for a larger share of total U.S. employment.

Men too sometimes find themselves beneath a glass ceiling--shut out of a job for which they are sure they're qualified. But they have to smash the ceiling the old-fashioned way: by leaving the company and starting their own business.

These are the facts of life in enterprise. You don't get to be boss because of credentials or good behavior. You don't zoom to the top in a glass slipper. You get to the top by devoting your life to the pursuit. And at the summit the slopes are slippery. Most of the time there is no glass floor to catch you if you fall.

The new way, if you're a woman or an approved minority, is to call a lawyer, as did Barbara Sogg. She wanted to run the American Airlines LaGuardia Office. But she was "stubborn and uncooperative," according to her superiors, and she had had heart surgery. And she lacked a degree in engineering. Just the sort of person you want in control at the airport. Passed over in favor of a male engineer, she sued. An affirmative-action triple threat, she charged discrimination on the basis of sex, age, and disability, and won a total of $7 million.

Wow. There's a woman who can cut it in modern-day America. She told the New York Times that she hoped the verdict would "shatter the glass ceiling that has kept women from many of the top jobs in large corporations."

Rule of the Worst

OF COURSE, in some circles frequented by feminists, the ceiling is indeed transparent. On university campuses, in soft subjects, the worst rule. It is similar in government. With the appropriate norming and other skews, credentials often can prevail. But in the dreaded private sector, outside of a few plush monopolies, performance is nearly everything. When you are competing with the Japanese, there is literally no room for bias of any sort--including affirmative action. And though many people do not want to face it, it is the heavily patriarchal societies of Japan and other Asian countries that we will be competing against more and more in most businesses.

Yet the women continue to complain and sue. They want to be allotted positions at the top. They want to ride up in a glass slipper.

What is going on here? Russell Kirk explained the problem in The Conservative Mind: "[Our] people have come to look upon society, vaguely, as a homogeneous mass of identical individuals, with indistinguishable abilities and needs, whose happiness may be secured by direction from above, through legislation or some manner of public instruction."

He is right. The problem is the sociological view: the belief in a society of monads that are all to be treated as human beings. But I have never met a human being, and I hope I never do. In this world, there are only men and women; and they are very different from one another. Vive la difference.

Different but Equal?

BUT IF men and women are different, there is no reason on earth to expect them to show up in comparable numbers in high-ranking jobs. There is no reason to believe that the male advantage in executive roles is an effect of discrimination. In fact, the differences between men and women overwhelmingly favor men in the positions beyond the glass ceiling.

Although there are many contrary claims and myths, anthropologists have yet to document a society in which men do not dominate the "top" jobs and do not tend to rule in male female relations. As Steven Goldberg has demonstrated in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, and as even Margaret Mead admitted, there has never existed a documented matriarchy. In other words, the glass ceiling is not a cultural peculiarity of the United States, reversible by legislation. All societies ever studied have a glass ceiling.

Ellen Goodman was grousing about the effects of this fact of life as seen in the Democratic presidential primaries. Although every one of the Democratic candidates supported every conceivable form of affirmative action and civil-rights litigation, there were no women candidates. Mrs. Goodman asked why Madeleine Kunin, the former governor of Vermont, was not running for President.