The Three Levels of the Glass Ceiling: Sorcerer's Apprentice to Through the Looking Glass

One of the most commonly asked questions about the glass ceiling is: why does it still exist? One of the most basic answers to this question is: because we haven't seen it clearly for what it is. Describing it more accurately becomes, potentially, a very useful activity. Talking about the glass ceiling in terms of global, societal, or philosophical issues is no substitute for defining the problem in functional terms. The more we describe the glass ceiling as the simple, tactical mechani hat continually implement it, the clearer the means for dismantling it become.

We have found it helpful to delineate three levels of the glass ceiling. Not every organization has all three, and sometimes one level is predominant in one part of an organization and not in another. But any company that wants to eliminate its own glass ceiling could benefit from analyzing its organization with respect to these levels. And any individual looking at how to negotiate through or around the glass ceiling should understand what level she's encountering, and ensure that she is not relying too much on tools and resources that helped her at a previous level - because they almost certainly won't work the same way at the next level.

We call these three levels (1) Apprenticeship; (2) The Pipeline; and (3) Alice in Wonderland.

Apprenticeship

In the United States, women have been admitted into apprenticeship programs in such large numbers, and for so many years, that it is easy for young women to believe -- and for management to assert -- that discrimination is obsolete, and that the glass ceiling is either a myth or an artifact that will automatically decay over time. The glass ceiling at the level of apprenticeship does exist, however, and although the immediate economic consequences are not attention-getting (very few apprentices sue), there are serious long-term implications for companies and the country.

Virtually every industry has its own version of an apprenticeship. In the United States, in contrast to Europe or Asia, this apprenticeship is frequently completed in graduate school. For instance, a recently-graduated MBA in the US is paid a professional-level salary and is expected to make a professional-level contribution in his or her first job. The same is true for a recently-graduated engineer in many disciplines. In other arenas, such as medicine, an actual apprenticeship in the form of internship and residency are required after graduate education, before full status as a professional is granted. In other fields, as diverse as police work and the practice of law, there is an informal but very real period of being a "rookie" in which one is expected, as in all apprenticeships, to work extraordinary hours, be very deferent, do work for which others take credit, and generally take abuse that clearly will not be required once the apprenticeship is completed.

One simple way to determine the boundary of apprenticeship is to find where, in a particular company or organization, the line is that must be crossed before an individual is "in the pack" to be considered for management or leadership. Salary may or may not change dramatically across this boundary; the same is true of title. For example, at a large retail food chain, the title and function of "Assistant Store Manager" marked the entry of an individual into the Pipeline. In a large defense contra have studied, there are many "Managers" but only one type, a "Project Manager", actually confers the opportunity to begin building credentials for power and authority in the company. In doing this sort of analysis, reliance on basic numbers that federal contractors gather for required reporting can be very misleading.

Women in every industry and profession report that sexual harassment is most common during apprenticeship. Indeed, sexual harassment is frequently defended as being just part of the normal hazing that is meted out to apprentices. In fact, it is one of the most important mechanisms that implements the glass ceiling at the level of apprenticeship. To say that sexual harassment has a dramatically greater effect on women than men may seem trivial, but it is important to understand that its use may he difference in how well women perform during apprenticeship, and even whether they complete the apprenticeship at all. At a recent gathering of women radiologists, we heard every single woman joke about her experiences of sexual harassment as a medical student and resident. They all agreed that the self-respect they had sacrificed by putting up with it was a price they had to pay to continue in their programs.

In any effective effort to eliminate the glass ceiling, an organization should delineate its own apprenticeship, and should pay particular attention to the fact that the apprentices are almost certainly underreporting the problem of sexual harassment. This is not to say that sexual harassment is not a problem at higher levels. Rather, it is important to recognize that the "effectiveness" of sexual harassment as a tool of discrimination is directly related to the power differential between the uals involved.

The other main mechanism of the glass ceiling at this level is outright exclusion, almost always with the justification that "women don't want" whatever the particular non-traditional entry-level job is. This justification has been disproven again and again in major class-action lawsuits. Most recently, a major grocery chain unsuccessfully attempted that argument for the second time in ten years. The first time, the jobs in question were in fact "traditionally male", in trucking, warehousing an ibution. The second time, more recently, the jobs were Assistant Store Manager positions, and the judgment against the company may end up in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

For women who find themselves barred or dissuaded from entering apprenticeships in any field, there is no one solution. In general, however, there are enough women who have made it into and through apprenticeships that today there are formal and informal professional and trade associations for women in almost every field. These can provide a great source of information and encouragement for younger women.

For women who are in apprenticeships, the basic realities of the low status combined with sex discrimination, can be daunting. When DataLine looks at women who have made it through tough apprenticeships, they seem almost always to have relied on three things: peer support and camaraderie (including regular sessions for venting); humor; and intense development of skill and expertise. We have also seen that to continue to rely as strongly on these in the next level can be a handicap.

The Pipeline

This second level of the glass ceiling, The Pipeline, is the range of jobs that are post-apprenticeship, but prior to senior or top management. We have previously defined top management as officers of a corporation and senior management as executives who report directly to top management. In non-profit or public sector organizations, top management is perhaps best defined as individuals reporting directly to the executive director - e.g. the equivalent of Cabinet members (who report directly to the president), and senior management is anyone reporting directly to top management.

Because there are women and minority men who have made it beyond the Pipeline, observers often question whether the glass ceiling "really exists" at this level. The simplest way to show the existence of the glass ceiling atop this second level is to look at some basic numbers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ratio of men to women in all managerial positions is 1.4 to 1. At the very top level of salary that the Bureau records, however, ($75,000 and above), the ratio of men to women is 20 to 1. The Department of Labor also confirmed the existence of the glass ceiling at this level in its "Report on the Glass Ceiling Initiative", the partial report of compliance reviews of nine federal contractors initiated under former Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole in 1990.

We have observed that the mechanisms implementing the glass ceiling at the Pipeline level fall into three main categories. And even though the Department of Labor failed to label any of these "sex discrimination", the Glass Ceiling investigators did in fact note examples in each of these categories in most, if not all, of the nine companies they reviewed.

One major category is the growth and the obfuscation of the pay gap. Again, the Labor Department found that none of the nine companies they studied had looked at total compensation of managers for gender-based inequity. DataLine looked for examples of companies that have proactively reviewed management compensation for gender discrimination, and to date has not found any. A spokesperson for The Hay Group, one of the preeminent consulting firms in the area of compensation and benefits, told us that the company does not look at gender issues. Given the relative cost-effectiveness of such a proactive study, compared to the cost of just one medium-sized lawsuit for gender-based pay discrimination, we were a little surprised, but the pay gap seems to be one of the more intractable issues in the Pipeline.

A second mechanism used to implement the glass ceiling at this level is denial of credential-building. This is not only the exclusion of women from credential-building experiences, but also the discounting of the credentials that a woman does hold.

Lynn Martin, the current Secretary of Labor, regularly emphasizes the respect this Administration has for the "cultural" differences among American companies. While large cultural differences certainly exist, we have also observed that within a given company, senior and top management are always pretty clear about what constitutes priority credential-building in their own culture. A company that wishes to eliminate its glass ceiling in the Pipeline should articulate its beliefs about credential-building; integrate review of these into its regular salary and performance review procedures; and require its managers to ensure that womenhave equal opportunity for credential building experiences.

The individual wishing to move through the Pipeline must also do the same analysis, and at the same time, begin dropping the concerns and defense mechanisms she may have acquired in apprenticeship. In the Pipeline, for example, it is no longer appropriate to allow others to take credit for work you have done. Further, you may need not only to keep the credit, but to take assertive action to make your accomplishments known. This runs counter to the social interaction skills many women have learned, and is definitely a departure from the deferential behavior that is acceptable in apprenticeship.

Additionally, jokingly accepting derogatory treatment, while never desirable, becomes more detrimental in the Pipeline than it was in apprenticeship. As an apprentice, you are not particularly expected to demand respect. In the Pipeline, to acquire not only the credentials you need to keep moving, but also the image of someone who has those credentials, you must demand basic respect. Also, mentorship, while not always effective, is usually a given in apprenticeship; mentors are automatically assigned. In the Pipeline, you may have to drop the expectation that your mentor will find or choose you. In most companies, a woman in the Pipeline needs to recruit her mentor in order to have access to important credential-building experiences. And finally, while developing skills and expertise continues to be important, the woman who considers them paramount, to the exclusion of relationship and image building, will probably find herself regularly losing out to individuals with less skill or accomplishment.

A third mechanism that implements the glass ceiling in the Pipeline is the use of recruiting services and strategies that unconsciously or explicitly discriminate. DataLine believes that this category is responsible for a significant portion of that radical drop-off from 1.4/1 to 20/1, and our interviews with the Labor Department's "Glass Ceiling investigators" confirmed this. Given the inexorable flow of women into the Pipeline over the last 25 years, the reported "no change" in the percentages en in senior management between Korn/Ferry's UCLA studies in 1980 and 1990 actually represents a decline. Korn/Ferry, the largest retained executive search firm in the world, reported this month that its own placements of women in "senior-level jobs more than tripled between 1981 and 1991". We have no way of knowing whether the definition of "senior-level" used in this report corresponds to the definition in the UCLA studies Korn/Ferry commissioned. If the tripling effect did happen, however, then the UCLA studies indicate that other search firms' placement of women in senior jobs must have decreased significantly over this same decade.

Alice in Wonderland

We call the third level of the glass ceiling Alice in Wonderland because for women who reach it, the rules and relationships seem so dramatically different; they frequently feel as if they have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place; and for many, the final outcome seems to be a corporate version of "off with their heads!" This third level is also a place where a woman can have a lot of fun, if she survives.

Levity aside, the third level is characterized by a dramatic decline in the numbers of female peers, and, as a result, significantly increased visibility for the few women who are here. Basically, a woman at this level has gone from being in a ratio of 2 women for every 3 men, to a ratio of 1 woman for every 20 men. This increased visibility can have a warping effect, independent of anything the woman executive is or is not doing, on how the woman views herself and how others view her.

In addition to the glare of the spotlight, many women at this level report a sudden, dramatic change in the criteria by which they are judged. Two of the best example of this come from the cases of Ann Hopkins at Price Waterhouse and Nancy Ezold at Wolf Block Schorr and Solis-Cohen. Since Price Waterhouse, a public accounting firm, and Wolf Block, a law firm, both have highly structured, hierarchical management paths, their procedures and criteria for evaluating senior managers moving through the Pipeline are explicit and detailed. Both Hopkins and Ezold had made stellar progress through their respective pipelines, and were exceeding their peers' (both men and women) contributions.

Yet when the time came to recognize them as full members of their firms' senior management ranks, both were denied partnership. In both cases, judicial review found that the women had been judged by different standards than their male peers. They had also been judged by criteria that had not applied during their Pipeline years. In Hopkins' case, it was that she did not wear enough makeup and she swore; in Ezold's case, it was that she had not, many years previously, gone to an Ivy League law school.

The effect of such a dramatic change in the way one is being assessed can be just a little crazy-making. If the change is in fact based solely or primarily on a woman's sex, after she has spent many years of leaping hurdles and accomplishing significant things despite her sex, the reassertion of this once-inconsequential factor as a determining factor is truly disorienting. (Compare for instance, what would happen to George Bush if he were told, after all these years of success and accomplishment and overcoming obstacles, both personal and systemic, that he could no longer be President because he is a man or because his "style" as a man doesn't work.)

In addition to being eliminated from the third level based on new assessment criteria, women at this level are frequently "beheaded" by having their departments or organizations re-organized out from under them. Although this can look, superficially, like politics as usual, there is a different end-result for a woman at this level compared to her male peer who "loses out" in a reorganization; her career is usually over. A different version of this mechanism is the placement of an acknowledged inferior over the woman who has reached the third level. This mechanism has a particularly dramatic, demoralizing effect not only on the specific woman executive, but also on less-senior women in the company who daily observe her fate.

Companies that want to eliminate the glass ceiling at this third level need to recognize that the problems of exagerrated visbility, isolation, and change in assessment critieria exist. CEO's and top management need to recognize that responding to these problems is not affirmative action for executive females, but a response to extra burdens women executives may suddenly find thrust upon them that male executives at this level do not have to contend with. Also, it is very important to realize that whatever programs a company has designed to deal with the larger issues and women in the workplace or balancing work and family, or to deal with the glass ceiling at the level of apprenticeship or the Pipeline, are not going to be relevant to the woman who has made it to this third level.

For women at this level, it becomes crucial to re-emphasize peer support and camaraderie. Since this is not usually easily at hand within the company, women need to give this enough priority to take the time to develop peer relationships in other companies and even in other industries. And, even though increased visibility may already be a strain, women at this level need to seek even greater visibility outside their companies, through community, professional, political, or other public involvement as a way of ensuring balanced feedback about her success. Finally, for a woman at this level who has spent most or all of her career in one company, it is important to become comfortable with and knowledgeable about the protocols and systems for making a job change at executive levels.