Glass Ceiling Basics

The Glass Ceiling is certainly an issue that engenders a great deal of emotion. But, as with any issue, it is always interesting to see if anyone has evidence to support their deeply-held beliefs.

At the Glass Ceiling Research Center, we have 22 years of data from 200 Fortune 500 corporations to support our conclusions. With such a massive amount of data, analysis does take a great deal of time, but some of our early findings suggest that sometimes the things that "everyone knows in their heart" are simply not true.

The bottom line is great news for women. Here is how we reached our conclusions.

You can believe most of the history up to about 1987. At about that time, the concept of the "glass ceiling" was created, the term came into wide usage, and the glass ceiling took off as a political issue. As with virtually any political issue, the masters of political spin soon took over and have been making political hay (and a great deal of money through grants and consulting fees) ever since.

Let's look at some facts. In the 1980s, not very many older (i.e. age 40+) women had a college education and still fewer had an advanced degree in business, so it was reasonable that very few women had the education, maturity, and experience to be upper level executives at business firms. At about that time, however, groups like NOW and The Feminist Majority Foundation began to demand 50-50 as the only "fair" representation for women. This was done in spite of the fact that men who were qualified by education, maturity, and experience outnumbered qualified women by a ratio somewhere in excess of 100:1.

The ratio of 50:50 is not supported by logic, but 100:1 does not seem to be fair to women either. How can we find a reasonable number that would establish what a level playing field would be? By what process could we change that number each year to reflect the best current information? We set about to answer these questions.

Leading observers, including the Glass Ceiling Commission, have concluded that whether you are male of female, it takes an MBA and 25 years of experience to be considered for an upper management position. Our work at the Glass Ceiling Research Center matched the percentage of women graduating with an MBA or other advanced management degree in a given year (for example, 1955) to the percentage of women on top management teams 25 years later (in our example, 1980). From there the math was simple. If the percentage of women in the executive suite in any year was less than the percentage graduating with an appropriate degree 25 years earlier, then a case could be made that some type of gender based discrimination may have occurred along the way.

The results we found were astonishing to us. For every single year since 1980, the percentage of women in upper management exceeded what would be expected. The expectation was exceeded by a ratio of at least 2:1 and in some years as high as 4:1. What this means is that a woman with an MBA and 25 years of experience has historically been between two and four times as likely to be promoted to the executive suite as her similarly-prepared male counterpart. This has been true for every year since before 1980, which was long before the Glass Ceiling became an issue.

The fact that women have outperformed men is great news for women! It means that, if you are a woman and put in the same hard work typically put in by a man, you have a much better chance of making it to top management than a man does. The facts are very clear on this point, and they stem from 22 years of data from 200 Fortune 500 firms. If anyone has a comparable data set that points to a different conclusion, we invite them to come forward.

At the current time, about 33% of MBAs are women, and women constitute about 18% of upper management teams (defined as the top 20 executives in a Fortune 500 company). That percentage is growing every year, because more and more women with the appropriate education are gaining the experience and maturity to reach leadership levels. This is wonderful news, not only for women, but for all of American society.

The promotion of women to the executive suite will continue for decades into the future. It will continue to result in a huge advantage for the United States in global competition, because our society will remain far ahead of other major industrialized nations in selecting the best people, whether male of female, to lead its industrial enterprises.

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"This information is made possible by Roy D. Adler, Executive Director of the Glass Ceiling Research Center."
About the author Roy Adler is Professor of Marketing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and Executive Director of the Glass Ceiling Research Center, which can be accessed at glassceiling.org.

This page is copyrighted by The Glass Ceiling Research Center (2001)