https://builtin.com/diversity-inclusion/glass-ceiling#3
“What is the Glass Ceiling and How Do We Break It?,” written by Bailey Reiners on September 30, 2019, explains about why there is glass ceiling and how we can combat it. Glass ceiling, prevents minorities and women form achieving higher leadership or professional success, causes women to get less wage than men. The reasons why there is glass ceiling can be divided to psychological, gender roles, gender bias, and sexual harassment. Gender roles explain that girls are expected to be feminine traits such as politeness, being accommodating, and nurturing while men are expected to be masculine traits such as competitiveness, aggression, and fearlessness. This culture leads to sex-segregated jobs from which stems gender wage gap. Speaking of gender bias, women tend to be biased and discriminated significantly more than men in the workplace; it is said that “both male and female managers are twice as likely to hire men over women”(What is the Glass). In short, more than 42 percent of women have experienced discrimination in the workplace. Next, sexual harassment is also one of the causes of glass ceiling, and according to a study on this article, “the women who experience sexual harassment within two years at a new job, 80 percent of them quit”(What is the Glass). As people can do easily to combat this glass ceiling, this article suggests that people need to understand what the glass ceiling is first, and try to talk about it to anybody so that they can get to know about it more. Letting everyone know about glass ceiling could change current situation.
Considering all of the biased and discriminating facts relating to women’s gender-based problems, it is no wonder that everyone comes up with the issue gender inequality as women’s problem. Nowadays, women are considered of taking care of their children, so they need to take time off for the children. And this affects women to get paid less. Even if they rejoin the workplace after taking care of their children, they probably would be several years behind men who has worked during the women are out of workplace. Conversely, men are more likely to achieve managerial roles and get paid more; this is called glass escalator. The glass ceiling also describes how hard women can become executives; “women constitute only about 16 percent of the top executives, and women executives are paid much less than their male counterparts”(Chapter 4.3 Dimensions of Gender Inequality).Also, sex-segregated jobs, which have requirements that make applicants hard to get jobs such as qualification, height, and work time, affect to women wage as well. Although this articles suggests that people need to talk about the glass ceiling more, I would say the wage gap would not be shrinking unless policymakers change the way how women can get paid as much as men. It is because I do not think ordinary people including workers can combat the glass ceiling by themselves, but policymakers also need to know about the situation so that gender wage gap could decrease.
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