Glass Ceiling is a term used to describe the challenges faced by women when trying to move to higher professional roles in male-dominated hierarchies. The barriers are most often unwritten, meaning, women are more likely to be restrained from advancing through accepted norms and implicit biases rather than defining corporate policies. In more recent years the analysis of the glass ceiling has expanded to include issues preventing not only women from moving up but also other minorities.
As more men join fields that were previously dominated by women, such as nursing and teaching, a new term, similar to the glass ceiling has come to fore- the “glass escalator”. Men in these fields are now being promoted and given more opportunities in comparison to women which shows as if men were afforded ‘escalators’ while women were taking the stairs. Instances of women breaking into the top positions in the upper echelons of most organizations, public, private or government, are relatively very few and far in between. Leadership is still almost exclusively that of men. It is obvious that even though societies differ from one another in culture, belief and norms, their expectations from women, their roles and their position in society are still very far from evolving into equal opportunity perceptions.
Author:
Yukta Raheja, Semester-4, Lifestyle Accessory Design, Unitedworld Institute of Design (UID)
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