Glass Ceiling Still Uncluttered, Essay Example

Is there any sense in your mind that there are barriers to women’s advancement in the firm? If not, have there been such barriers in the past, or at competing firms?

The last few decades have seen to the phenomenal transformation in the social role of women. Women have made an impressive gain in accessing economic opportunities, attaining the position of co-decision makers in families and pursuing illustrious careers. In companies, women have gained, albeit marginally, in the share of leadership portfolios.

Nevertheless, a brief preview of some of our major institutions, organizations and social entities is still indicative of numerous barriers erected against women advancement. In UK for example, we would expect a greater women representation in leadership. However, we have fewer women MPs in Britain than in Rwanda, China or Afghanistan. The same scenario is replicated across the globe, especially so when it comes to company leadership. The truth is, that although we have made considerable gains in allowing women into opportunities hitherto exclusively accessible to men, the glass ceiling is still unsheltered in many a working places.

A case in point is the recent shareholder’s resolution at Wal-Mart (September 2008), the multinational retail chain. Shareholders voted down the adoption of a report detailing necessary steps that could aid management in eradicating its “glass ceiling”, (artificial barriers) deterring the advancement of women employees into senior management positions. This resolution gained only 5.05% support, and is thus ineligible for re-submission come next year. The repercussions of such instances are that the glass ceiling remains as solid as it ever was.

One indicative benchmark of an existing glass ceiling is the compensation of women in a particular firm. Over 85% of the Fortune 500 companies, lack not even a single woman among the five highest paid executives, (Sullivan and Sheffrin 107-108). A recent study by Catalyst found that for each dollar earned by corporate white men in 2008, the white women in corporations earned 78 cents; the African-American women earned 67 cents while Hispanic women earned 56 cents. The implication is obvious here.

Salaries are a means of compensation an employee for his or her contribution to an organization and or company. The more you pay an individual, the more such an individual is deemed to have contributed. Therefore, when you pay women less, you imply that their contribution to the corporate entity was equally less. Most firms usually barricade against women advancement to the supervisor capacities, financial management portfolios, to executive officers and to the board of directors. There are certain areas in corporate management however, that open up to women more than others, chief among them being Public Relations and Human Resource management.

At the background of this phenomenon are some inequality parameters that are still part of our social systems. Some malignant appendages of inequality practices in workplaces, originally inherited from the totalitarian and grossly macho cultures of the pre-gender equality revolution are still in progress. Such includes the perception of women in the traditional roles of mother and wife.

For instance, in Britain, women are given a year’s maternity leave while their husbands are not eligible for leave. That means the woman stays at home while the man has no opportunity to share in the parental childcare. The decision of which parent takes the year off has already been made by policy and largely based on the patriarchal society mentality where men remain breadwinner dads and the women stay-at-home mums.

Most firms still peg such decisions as maternity leave on the subliminal consensus held against women, that only men are strategically capable of maintaining progress in a firm (Sullivan and Sheffrin 107-108). In most cases, men are preferred in leadership due to their reliability without calendar-based inconveniences, their regularity without having to get babies and their availability to work long hours. Still others believe that men are unemotional when it comes to fighting competition and exploiting the market maximally. Each firm displays some peculiar reasons for preferring men to women in corporate leadership. Thus results the unabated mainstay of the glass ceiling for women in workplaces.

Work Cited

Sullivan, Arthur, and Steven Sheffrin M. Economics: Principles in Action. New Jersey: Upper Saddle River, 2003.