Is the glass ceiling bulletproof? Well I think that’s up to interpretation. In the last few decades’ women have certainly made leaps and bounds in the professional world. The number of female CEO’s of Fortune 1000 companies has increased 5%. The past 2 secretaries of state, presidential and vice presidential candidate, speaker of the house and 2 Supreme Court justices are all female. So why do men still make 20% more than women and despite identical education and ambition still reach higher levels in the corporate world? Well I have two theories about that—the first is the maternal dilemma; the second is the curse of ambition.
Although we are very logical in nature, we are also maternal. And as such, we often quit our jobs or put our careers on hold to start or care for our family. Our “better half” might claim they have to take a day or two off from the sheer exhaustion of the act of fulfilling our desire to have a child, but in the end we’re the one who have to take off from work to raise our families. Sure, there is the growing trend of “stay at home dads” and if that works for your family, then more power to you. But with our maternal instinct and the desire to have a child comes a desire to care for that child too. So what this whole problem essentially comes down to is deciding how to enable women to have children while having a successful career too.
Perhaps the answer is that you cannot have both at the same time. Postponing a career or childbearing are both very real, but sometimes, problematic possibilities. Taking a few years leave from the war zone known as the corporation can cause you to miss out on learning about new technologies and prevent valuable networking opportunities. Meanwhile having a baby later in life would cause you to end your career earlier and women who give birth later in life are much more likely to have complications at birth.
Another option that some companies are considering is on-site daycares. Business Software Firm SAS began its onsite childcare in 1981 when the founder learned of an employee’s intention to stay home with her newborn. Almost 30 years later the facility has expanded to include a day care, Montessori school, and bright horizon center located right next to SAS’s office building.
So now lets assume a women has made it into a powerful corporate position. Many then believe this woman must be a conniving bitch that has slithered her way up the food chain and into her current position—never mind that a man in the same role is simply termed ambitious, or skillful. Perhaps this is the reason so few women ever venture beyond a cubicle job. It seems to me that even if women were given an equal opportunity to pursue their career goals, they would yet again be put under the microscope to determine their ulterior motives.
This version of sex discrimination is the worst kind because it’s an imbedded belief and only causes exponential discrimination. To solve the problem of the glass ceiling, we must first begin with the fundamental idea that women and men can both be ambitious, and that a man is just as likely as a women to allow their emotions to get involved.
In the end, I like to think, no, the glass ceiling is not bulletproof, but perhaps we are just not using the right kind of bullets yet.
