glass ceiling:
Empirical studies show that women are less likely to hold management and supervisory jobs than men even after controlling for education, experience and occupation. under _representation of women within organizations may contribute to the gender gap in the allocation of managerial jobs as women managers are concentrated in predominantly women’s jobs with little career mobility and low pay. One subtle form of discrimination may be to place women in token supervisory jobs that do not entail critical decision _ making when women are placed in supervisory that do not involve extensive training, interactions with their superiors, and decision _ making power, the level of experience or tenure that they acquire within the organization is also devalued. Despite the increased numbers of women both participating in the workforce and achieving management position the evidence is that , for the majority , advancement to the very highest level is rare and that the “glass ceiling “ still exists.
An alternate explanation was introduced in 1986 , when writers of the Wall Street Journal described the glass ceiling metaphor. The glass ceiling has become an accepted metaphor for describing faced by women to progression in employment. Several studies ,both academic and governmental , have shown that despite the efforts to increase diversity , women still face the glass ceiling when it comes to the top management jobs . Examining statistics on who gets promoted into management and, particularly, who gets the top spots in any organization show that even employers with the best general employment diversity records do not fare as well in fostering diversity in organizational upper atmosphere . The higher the position , in both, the private and public sectors , the less likely that women or minorities will fill it. Theories and models accounting for the emergence of gender related behaviors in organizations, and thus the creation of a glass ceiling , fall into three categories :
(1) Biological explanations ;
(2) Socialization explanations ; and
(3) Structural _ cultural explanations