Breaking the Barriers (or not?)
By Anannya Gupta
“Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
I rise”
A poem written by Maya Angelou in 1978 during the ending years of the second wave of Feminism which successfully campaigned for women’s right to work among others stands as true for today’s women as it did back then because although we seemed to have progressed on the surface, much has in reality gone far from what it was. This I seek to prove with two phenomena currently operational in the job industry especially against women in the workforce.
The First one has of late begun to get recognition. It being none other than Glass ceiling. This phrase was coined by Marilyn Loden at a 1978 Women's Exposition in reference to a panel discussion about women in the workforce. Like the term suggests, glass ceiling refers to an invisible barrier that restricts how high you can advance, in our case advance in ranks, in the job market. In other terms, it refers to situations where women (or people from other marginalised sections) are prevented from holding executive ranks only by virtue of their identities.
Delayed promotions, preferential promotion to male counterparts, not receiving equal pay for equal work, isolation at work, experiences of micro aggression are some of the ways in which it operates and also reflects the consequences it can have for women.
Although it would be enticing to think that women have now been breaking through the glass ceiling, the extent to which it still survives is quite shocking.
The most striking example of its manifestation that has survived till date would probably be of the American President. America has not seen a woman president in the more than 275 years of its existence as a democracy. And the results of the 2024 elections are all set to continue this chain.
Not only the US, the UN Women report recently revealed that a staggering 113 countries in the world have never had a woman lead them. And this is just one domain. Countless other fields with similar statistics still await their due attention.
Over the years, many solutions, like Blind auditions, have been suggested. But to implement any, we must first come out of the mindset that assumes we have progressed enough. As a matter of fact, we have not. We still have a long and tiring journey to cover. I will further substantiate this claim with a second and even more interesting (and disturbing) phenomenon: that of a Glass Cliff.
This phenomenon explains what happens after the glass ceiling is finally shattered or inversely why it was broken in the first place.
Prima Facie, it might appear a useless exercise. Afterall, a woman becoming a CEO of a major MNC, for instance, should be perceived as good news and as a sign of progress. What’s the need for probing anything here? No, not if she is being set up for deliberate failure.
Let’s consider it this way. Suppose there is a battalion at war, and in the immediate battle they are going to fight, they know their commander will most definitely be dead. So they decide to appoint a woman to lead them. Not because they have faith in her, this is what they want others (including her) to believe, but so that they can ensure that their male commanders can return back home valiant once she is killed off and the war ends.
This is exactly what happens when a glass cliff plays out in the labour market. This trend was brought forward not too long back, in 2005, by researchers, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom in a report, wherein they evaluated the performance of 100 companies included in the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 Index before and after women were appointed board members in response to and in order to refute a report published earlier which claimed that placing women at leadership positions was detrimental to a company.
In their report they found that when a company was seen to be doing poorly, when its chances of survival looked bleak, they resorted to appointing women to executive positions. Using them as scapegoats, they shielded their “prominent” male counterparts and provided ground for claiming that the glass ceiling is in fact a protective shield. In metaphorical terms, setting them up for failure meant the women were being pushed off a cliff.
The most famous example of this has been the appointment of Marissa Mayer as the CEO of Yahoo. Marissa was appointed CEO of the company in 2012 at a time when there was little hope of saving the giant and promptly fell off the glass cliff. Over the years, in fact, this has become quite prevalent and has left little in the name of a solution behind it.
It might be noted here that even Twitter (Now X), gained a woman CEO only recently, when there were talks of its dwindling future post acquisition by Elon Musk. Whether or not it will turn into another textbook example of a glass Cliff remains to be seen.
But one thing can be said for sure, the future of women in the labour market still looks less than promising unless we recognise the need for immediate actions for the women to finally break the barrier and not emerge as a glass cliff.
Bibliography:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/glass-ceiling.asp
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