Class, gender, and parental values in the 1990s - Response to Baxter and Wright

The glass ceiling is a very popular metaphor among gender scholars. It has become a shorthand expression for describing the myriad obstacles that prev ent women from being promoted to high positions of authority, prestige, and pay. So it is significant when Gender & Society publishes an article debun king its implicit claims. In their recent article, Janeen Baxter and Erik Olin Wright (2000) argue th at the metaphor of the glass ceiling does not accurately depict the barrier s that women confront in the workforce, in their study of three countries, they find little evidence to support the idea that discrimination against w omen increases as they move into top-level management positions. They sugge st that barriers for women actually may be greater at the lower levels of j ob hierarchies than at the top. It is debatable whether they have correctly defined the glass ceiling, howe ver. They write, "Taken literally, the metaphor of the glass ceiling implie s the existence of an impermeable barrier that blocks the vertical mobility of women. Below this barrier women are able to get promoted; beyond this b arrier, they are not" (p. 276). To test for the existence of the glass ceil ing, they examine whether "the barriers to managerial promotions become inc reasingly severe for women compared to men as they move up the hierarchy" ( p.227).