Glass Ceiling Assignment
Ashley Lenix
HRM
Northern OK College
Women at work are 18% less likely to be promoted than their male peers at entry levels,
they ask for promotions at comparable rates to men, but are not promoted at the same rate. They
are less likely to receive advice from managers and senior leaders on career advancement, yet
employees who do are likely to be promoted. Get less access to senior leaders, as well as being
less interested in becoming top executives as they see the pros and cons. When it comes to the
skills needed to be a leader such as being assertive, women are judged more harshly than men. A
new study by New York Times bestselling author, Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, revealed
that when women are judged as forceful or assertive their perceived competency drops by 35%
and their perceived worth by $15,088. In contrast when men are judged as forceful, their
competency only drops by 22% and their worth only dips by $6,547. These differences show that
gender bias serves as a real barrier for women rising into leadership roles, where assertiveness is
a valued trait of senior leadership differently.
It’s not surprising that women are underrepresented at higher levels of the corporate
pipeline. This disparity between how male and females progress along the corporate ladder is the
most significant in financial and technology sectors. Women make up 55% of manager-level
employees, but only 15% of C-Suite officers, and just 5% of CEOs. When it comes to women of
color, representation in these top jobs is even less. But how can an organization break the ceiling
of gender bias? Make sure that the workplace is aware of gender bias, the first step is for the
employees of the company become self-aware of their unconscious biases and how these may
affect their decision-making. Audit for bias across the entire talent management lifecycle.
Although self-awareness is a good first step nothing will change unless legacy HR processes and
practices are reformed to correct bias. Unfortunately, leaders mean well and express a desire to
increase diversity and gender equality. But when they are making hiring and promotion decision
they tend to fall back on their own unconscious biases of selecting people like themselves.
Create a female mentor program, only 56% of organizations have formal mentoring
programs for women, according to the recent survey. However, mentoring is a powerful way to
give mentees the break they need to both develop and advance within organizations. Mentors in
leadership positions can serve as advisors and champions for promotions. In fact, research shows
that mentoring programs can make organizations managerial ranks more diverse. On average
they boost the representation of black, Hispanic and Asian-American women and Hispanic and
Asian-American men, by 9% to 24%. In industries like chemicals and electronics, mentoring
programs also increase the ranks of white women and black men by 10% or more.
Introduce targeted programs that target women, research has shown that specific
programs like college recruitment efforts to increase female hires make a big difference.
According to the Harvard Business Review, 5 years after a company implements a college
recruitment program targeting female employees, the share of white, black, Hispanic and AsianAmerican women in its management rises by about 10% on average. Other programs like
targeting high-performing females to participate in leadership programs or internship that enable
women who have taken time of for child-rearing to transition back to work can all contribute to
boosting the number of women at the top. Often women themselves opt out of promotions or
leaderships position because they are juggling childcare. Enabling women to “do it all” by
introducing more workplace flexibility, telecommuting options, the work life balance, onsite
childcare and extended maternity/paternity leave can encourage more women to climb the upper
echelons.
Train and hold hiring managers accountable, too often senior leaders espouse a
commitment to gender and diversity inclusion, but lack follow-through and accountability to
ensure this occurs down the ranks from recruiters to hiring managers. If you want to move the
needle, then train your managers to watch for bias and encourage them to mentor and nurture
women on their team. It's also important to hold them accountable for reaching gender targets
when it comes to hiring and promoting people. Attaining these gender and diversity targets
should be part of evaluating managers performance or let’s be honest, nothing will happen.
Many CEOs who make gender diversity a priority by setting aspirational goals for the
proportion of women in leadership roles, insisting on diverse slates of candidates for senior
positions, and developing mentoring and training programs are frustrated. They and their
companies spend time, money, and good intentions on efforts to build a more robust pipeline of
upwardly mobile women, and then not much happens. The problem with these leaders’
approaches is that they don’t address the often-fragile process of coming to see oneself, and to be
seen by others, as a leader. Becoming a leader involves much more than being put in a leadership
role, acquiring new skills, and adapting one’s style to the requirements of that role. It involves a
fundamental identity shift. Organizations inadvertently undermine this process when they advise
women to proactively seek leadership roles without also addressing policies and practices that
communicate a mismatch between how women are seen, and the qualities and experiences
people tend to associate with leaders.
The path between an idea in someone’s mind and a manufactured product rolling off an
assembly line, gives some women the passion and they are fortunate that their day job is to spend
most of their time in design studios and factories. In this work, sometimes weeks go by and they
don’t encounter other women but what can they say? This is where they are the happiest. If there
were a perfume made up of loud, industrial suds and turpentine, it would probably be most of
those women’s favorite.
In everyday detail, she is reminded of other women in manufacturing constantly. While
in a cab she notices seats sewn by successors of the Ford upholstery workers who in the late 60’s
demanded a fair wage and help usher in the Equal Pay Act in the United Kingdom. On the
Brooklyn Bridge, she wished she could high-five the ghost of Emily Warren Roebling, who took
over as chief engineer of the bridge after her husband fell ill. As well as being on an airplane, she
thanks Elise MacGrill for her leadership in helping to make aerospace assembly like some of the
most safe and efficient across any manufacturing segment.
The positive outlook was that although she done encounter as many women in
manufacturing as she would like to. She has some to believe that she sees a much larger
percentage of women faces soon. This is because they will work in changing dramatically. Gone
are the days of co-located terms that work for only a few hours each day. Soon the norm will be
distributed teams that share digital product models in the cloud and pass tasks around the globe
in shifts.
“It’s well documented that girls often approach situations with higher levels of empathy,
allowing them to see subtleties and frame things in more appealing ways.”
Women naturally excel in those situations. It’s well documented that girls develop strong
communication skills years before boys and often approach situations with higher levels of
empathy, allowing them to see subtleties and frame things in more appealing ways. Beyond that,
girls have the arithmetic and verbal skills needed to define, create and perfect complex
manufacturing systems. In countries such as Iran, Malaysia and Uzbekistan, most graduates and
engineering class of 56% women. I believe that the new education reforms in STEM will do
much to attract more girls to math and sciences in the United States.
Let’s stop talking and start doing, The Women in the Workplace report concluded that
the progression of women’s equality is advancing so slowly that parity could take more than a
century at this current rate. Should we wait another century? It is time we stop talking and started
doing something about it. Going beyond unconscious bias training, organizations will need to
implement the host of new HR processes and accountability targets to really move the needle and
change behavior.
Recent headlines tell the story that the popular media wants us to believe about women in
the executive suite: "Women Gain Numbers, Respect in Boardrooms," "New Career Trend: She
Goes, He Follows," "Women Entrepreneurs Have Come a Long Way, “Women are Liberating a
Citadel of Male Power," and "You've Come a Long Way, Baby." Clever as the headlines are,
these depictions of women's success in the corporate world are misleading. Increasingly, women
are bumping into a "glass ceiling." Ann Morrison describes the problem: the glass ceiling is a
barrier "so subtle that it is transparent, yet so strong that it prevents women from moving up the
corporate hierarchy." From their vantage point on the corporate ladder, women can see the highlevel corporate positions but are kept from "reaching the top" (Breaking the Glass Ceiling).
According to Morrison and her colleagues, the glass ceiling "is not simply a barrier for an
individual, based on the person's inability to handle a higher-level job. Rather, the glass ceiling
applies to women as a group who are kept from advancing higher because they are women.'
What causes the "glass ceiling?" Here are what women executives think.
According to one executive recruiter, the biggest barrier to women in top management
levels is the "bunch of guys sitting together around a table" making all the decisions. In short,
when deciding who to promote into management, male corporate leaders tend to select people as
much like themselves as possible - so it is no surprise that women are frequently not even
considered at promotion time. Instead, the men at the top look to former colleagues and old
school ties; in both areas, women have been virtually absent. Women executives are frequently
excluded from social activities and often describe the "clubbiness" among the men that exists at
the top. The corporate executive suites are "the ultimate boys' clubs."
Even on a more formal level, women report there are "certain kinds of meetings" they
don't get invited to because they are not seen as policy makers. Corporate women don't travel on
business as frequently as men, according to surveys by Korn/Ferry International (1982) and Wall
Street Journal Gallup (1984). Studies confirm these differences in status and the different
treatment of women. One study found that among executives at the same level, men "managed
greater numbers of people, had more freedom to hire and fire, and had more direct control of the
company's assets" than women (Harlan and Weiss)
References
How gender bias is affecting women in the workplace today/ https://business.udemy.com/blog/5tips-fix-gender-bias-your-organization/
How Women are moving Manufacturing Forward/Sarah Krasley/ Technologist, Creative
Business Strategist, Autodesk /http://www.educationandcareernews.com/career-development/howwomen-are-moving-manufacturing-forward
Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers/By: Herminian Ibarra, Robin J Ely, and Deborah M. Kolb
https://hbr.org/2013/09/women-rising-the-unseen-barriers
The Glass Ceiling: How women are blocked from getting to the top/ Empowering women in
Business/ https://www.feminist.org/research/business/ewb_glass.html