Q: Should women be worries about the glass ceiling in the workplace?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 10, 1997 | by Ida L. Castro, | Diana Furchtgott-Roth

A decade ago it was the venerable bible of the business world, the Wall Street Journal, that introduced to the American public the term glass ceiling when its "Corporate Women" column identified a puzzling phenomenon. There seemed to be an invisible -- and impenetrable -- barrier between women and the executive suite, leaving them at the peak of their careers at a significantly lower level, condemned to watch their male counterparts advance swiftly beyond them.

Ten years later, the vast majority of women are not able to even "peep" through the glass ceiling and instead are excluded by "glass walls," because they are channeled, tracked and trapped in staff jobs that do not lead to the executive suite or provide visibility to decisionmakers. They are denied rotational job assignments that give a candidate a wider range of experiences. This lack of exposure prevents networking, a common mechanism of upward mobility. In addition, people responsible for hiring tend to feel most comfortable hiring people who look like them -- further compounding the effects of the initial tracking system. In any eventy, for women who have family responsibilities, such as elder or child care, networking and schmoozing with the decisionmakers after hours generally is limited.

A 1990 Business Week study of 3,664 business-school graduates found that women with degrees from Top 20 business schools earned 12 percent less in their first year than men with comparable qualifications and took longer to move into top management. Additionally, a 1993 follow-up study of the Stanford University Business School class of 1982 found 16 percent of the men were CEOs, chairmen of boards or company presidents, while only 2 percent of the women were. Since 1981, women have earned more than 50 percent of all masters degrees awarded. Yet, few women have made it to the very top, illustrated by the fact that although 404 of the Fortune 500 companies now have one or more women on their boards of directors, women hold only one in 10 seats.

Women have made some progress during the last decade and have significantly increased their access to college and graduate-school training: They made up about 43 percent of all employees in the executive, administrative and managerial occupations in 1995, up from 39 percent in 1988. This occupational category includes fast-food restaurant managers, chief executive officers, or CEOs, of large corporations; accountants; underwriters, administrators, financial planners, medicine and health managers, and other occupations.

However, despite these gains and accomplishments, they are not being rewarded with pay and promotions. Surveys of the Fortune 1,000 industrial and the Fortune 500 service companies conducted by Korn/Ferry International and the Catalyst organization during the last decade found that 95 percent of senior-level managers, vice presidents and above are men and, of that figure, 97 percent are white. This means there are slightly more than 2,100 senior women executives in these companies -- far too few in proportion to their numbers in the workforce. Of the 5 percent of senior managers that are women, 95 percent are white, 2.2 percent are African-American, 1.8 percent are Asian and/or Pacific Islander and .2 percent are Hispanic.

The federal Glass Ceiling Commissions bipartisan study in 1995 found that although some positive steps are being taken, the glass ceiling essentially was intact. Minority men and women of all races are not well-represented in the upper echelons of the companies reviewed compared with their overall numbers in the workforce. The commission found that, among the companies reviewed, the highest-ranking woman averaged two reporting levels away from the CEO. Only four women reported directly to a CEO. African-American men and women and Hispanic and Asian men were on average three reporting levels from the top, while Hispanic and Asian women were four reporting levels from the top. On average, the highest-paid woman in each company had the 20th highest salary in the organization. And finally, women were found consistently to lag behind men in salary.

In 1993, the commission initiated a new round of glass-ceiling reviews to evaluate progress on removing barriers and to gather examples of positive actions taken by companies to remove those barriers. The commission examined the corporate-management practices of 53 companies that represent 29 industries and employ approximately 1.4 million people.

According to the report, one of the most common complaints voiced by women in the survey was lack of good-faith efforts. Fully one-third of the companies reviewed did not rate their officers or their top-level managers for performance in the area of equal-employment opportunity. Moreover, almost a third of the companies reviewed stated that the major barrier to the advancement of women and minorities was that qualified candidates weren't available when, in fact, those companies had failed to make any effort, good-faith or otherwise, to recruit them.