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Running Head : GLASS CEILING

Glass Ceiling

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Glass Ceiling

Overview

Glass ceiling can be defined as the invisible barrier preventing women and racial minorities from rising to the highest positions in an organization . To understand the phenomenon of glass ceiling , I herein review two articles on glass ceiling published in journals within the last two years . The first article , titled The Glass Ceiling Effect is written by David Cotter , Joan Hermsen , Seth Ovadia and Reeve Vanneman . They define four criteria

that must be met for glass ceiling to exist and then based on these criteria , examine gender and race inequalities at different levels of organizational hierarchy . Their research concludes that glass ceiling is predominantly a gender phenomenon and all differential work rewards cannot be attributed to glass ceiling

The second article reviewed in this essay is titled A decade of corporate women : some progress in the boardroom , in the executive suite ' and written by Catherine Daily , Trevis Certo and Dan Dalton . The article examines if women have been able to break the glass ceiling in the 10 years between 1987 and 1996 and have an increased representation in corporate boardrooms and CEO positions . They find that while there are many more women in corporate boardrooms there is not much improvement when it comes to CEO positions

Main Distinguishing Issues

The main points in the article The Glass Ceiling Effect ' is clearly listing the four criteria that must be present for glass ceiling to exist . They argue that glass ceiling is different from general racial and gender based discrimination and it should be defined very carefully in to avoid general racial and gender inequalities being categorized as glass ceiling . They list four criteria which must be met for a corporate inequality to be labeled as glass ceiling . The first criteria of glass ceiling is that it must represent a difference that is not explained by other job-relevant characteristics of the employee ' The are of the view that it is impossible to measure all the job relevant employee characteristics and it is possible to control for two many characteristics as some characteristics may have become irrelevant with time . Another problem with this criterion is that there may be disputes related to what constitutes job-related characteristics . For example , some employers may consider the marital status of an employee as an important criterion for determining promotion as they feel marital status can effect a productivity

The second criteria listed by Cotter et al for determining the presence of glass ceiling is that the racial or gender difference is greater at higher levels of an outcome than at lower levels of an outcome ' In other words the difference should increase as a person moves up the corporate ladder . If the difference remains constant throughout the organization it constitutes a general gender or racial bias and cannot be defined as glass ceiling

The third criterion for presence of glass ceiling is that chances of promotions...