Shattered Bonk. Ouch. It’s the noise made by bunches of gals smacking into the glass ceiling. Over and over; in public life; in corporate life; in all segments of society where women should be and could be running half the show, but are not. If it’s not the glass ceiling, it’s what some women call the sticky floor. Or the concrete wall. Whatever it is, you have to ask: what’s the reason for this persistent problem? Why is one-half of our population, better-educated and more qualified than ever, still barely represented in positions of leadership and power? Not only has the United States never had a woman as president or vice-president, but we rank 60th in the world — behind Andorra — in numbers of women elected to national government, out of over 180 countries that vote. Five states, including Vermont, have never sent a woman to Congress. In corporate life, a mere 13 percent of corporate directors in Fortune 500 companies are women. Fifty-four of the five hundred have no women directors at all. In 2002, only fourteen of these companies were headed by women. A scant 3.9 percent of these companies’ top earners were women. In education, there are almost three times more men in tenured positions than there are women. Women’s tenure rates increased by 1.5 percent over twenty years, compared with an 8 percent increase for men, who were already far ahead in numbers. Most tenured women hold lower ranking jobs than tenured men. Since the wild and crazy days of women’s lib and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which took a stab at making gender-based discrimination illegal, it seems to a lot of us that our move toward equality has screeched to a dead halt. A lot of people, of course, blame the women. Sure, a lot of gals who fought for equal rights at work and in public office have laid down their weapons and hustled off to do the jobs they worked so hard to acquire in the first place. They talked the talk; now they’re walking the walk. Meanwhile, they are also doing the society-building chores in family and community that seem to be our provenance. And, the closer you get to women who are the busiest, the louder the bonking sound becomes. Some people think that our involvement in the care of our families and communities is the reason for the glass ceiling. The traditional argument from the masculine culture is: how can she rise to the top if she can’t devote ninety hours a week to work? The traditional response to that is, Dude, I don’t see you picking up the slack! Is this difference in priorities inborn? Famous women’s doctor Christiane Northrup says our fertility-age hormones are the glue that sticks us into caring about our relations as much as we do our jobs. It’s our chemistry that make us skip late-night meetings when there’s a situation at home. This sounds like a rerun of the old biology-is-destiny argument that we thought we’d buried years ago. And it’s wrong. The only reason women rush off to deal with family problems is that nobody else will. And that’s still OK with everybody! For example: the reason that women aren’t advancing in academia, according to a 2003 Advancing Women In Leadership report, is that the structure of academics is “based on male career patterns only, and women are not taken into consideration... and it is women who must learn how to cope and succeed in the prevailing system.” Bonk! Ow! Who put that glass ceiling there? Not us. Don’t say there’s no better way. In Madame President, her book about the ultimate glass ceiling, Eleanor Clift says that when women run congressional committees, there aren’t any late-night meetings. And everyone’s happy about that, even the men. A local political expert — a man — told me recently that when women participate in legislation, the result is “more reflective of how we really live.” This same expert told me, wistfully, that he’d loved to have taken his 12-week paternity leave when his son was born, but doing so would have had “negative consequences” for his job. In her book Sex and Power, Susan Estrich says, “If more fathers would father more, not only could women mother less, but parenting would be valued more.” The only way to a more balanced view — to keeping concerns of family and community, like child care, education, and health care (what men call ‘soft’ issues) on an even par with commerce and war — is to get significant numbers of women calling the shots. The bad news is that guys don’t want this to happen. Study after study shows that men invariably, instinctively, help each other to advance while invariably, instinctively, putting barriers in the way of women. Bonk. Ouch. The good news is that when confronted with this behavior by groups of women, they start to shift. A little. Inch by inch. But it happens. How many women does it take? The magic number isn’t a hundred, or ten, but — three. Three women coming together, reaching up, and giving a little push. Three women under one roof is what it takes to crack the glass ceiling. |
Sometimes
when it’s quiet, and you’re sitting there, tuned into the
cosmos, what you hear is the sound of sensitive organisms smacking into
something hard and inflexible.