Glass Ceiling: Does it Really Exist?

Shobha and Kamalesh, both batchmates at a reputed engineering college, were thrilled that both were selected for a multinational company. Five years down the line, Kamalesh’s growth has been faster than Shobha’s. Ask Kamalesh and the reply comes that he deserved it. Shobha blames it on glass ceiling.

As per Wikipedia, the term glass ceiling refers to situations where the advancement of a qualified person within the hierarchy of an organization is stopped at a lower level because of some form of discrimination, most commonly sexism or racism, but since the term was coined, "glass ceiling" has also come to describe the limited advancement of the deaf, blind, disabled, aged and sexual minorities. But mostly it is used as some form of gender-based workplace limitations towards the fairer sex.

Statistics say that the world is ever changing and so are the roles; however all is not same in the upper echelons of the corporate world. Globally less then 1% of women are board members, and this figures falls drastically in case of India.

But are we missing the point here? There are professions like nursing, information technology, banking where women have a big presence while in some professions like mining, forging, it is predominantly a male bastion. Psychologist Warren Farrell, Ph.D., the San Francisco-based author of such books as Why Men Earn More and The Liberated Man, has a specific take on the equation. "Women enter into those areas because they are the most fulfilling," he says. "Men don't because they feel they need to take on the responsibility of providing for the family, and the way they earn love is to earn money." That's not to say that some careers can't be lucrative, but more often than not, they are far surpassed by salaries in some fields such as finance and technology. This also does not conclude that men are good at certain professions or women are good in some others. In fact, I have seen women handling assembly lines in automobile companies and equally adept at the forging shop. In fact people also talk about reverse glass ceiling where men find it tough to succeed in women dominated professions.

Based on my personal experience, it is not lack of skill set or capability or any sort of discrimination which prevents a woman from rising to the top. Women in India, a country that prides itself on being a traditional society, still face enormous pressure to conform to social mores. More often than not, the hurdle of conforming to traditional roles within families poses as a barrier to businesswomen in India. This is one reason why men are more flexible in matters like relocation, working odd hours which do count when it comes to climbing up the social ladder. Though women have made great strides in the corporate world in the last three decades, women from all income classes are still too often discouraged by family members from having careers that infringe too much on family life.
However, in the last 30 years, things have changed drastically in India. Women of the likes of Lalita Gupte, Kalpana Morparia, Indra Nooyi, Anu Aga, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Simone Tata, have quietly broken through the barriers of social conformity--both at home and in the workplace--to become successful entrepreneurs and professionals.
If we look at other professions, we now see women conductors in buses, women auto drivers, women police officers and the numbers have been increasing day by day.
To conclude, the glass ceiling is more of a result of the rules of the society rather than any kind of discrimination.