Meaning
The invisible barrier that keeps qualified women - and by extension minorities - from rising beyond a certain level in an organization, however good their record. Nothing in the rules blocks them, which is the point of the metaphor: the ceiling is real, but you cannot see it, and it breaks only under exceptional pressure. Standard in management, policy, and diversity discussion; the metaphor implies invisible, systemic blocking rather than open exclusion, so use it precisely. Regional use: General English; American workplace origin.
Origin
The idea has a startling forerunner: in her unperformed 1839 play Gabriel, the French novelist George Sand wrote of an impenetrable vault of crystal above ambitious women. The modern English phrase is usually credited to Marilyn Loden, who used it in a 1978 speech about women being blamed for barriers that were not of their making. Katherine Lawrence and Maryanne Schreiber brought it into workplace discussion at Hewlett-Packard around 1979, and Gay Bryant popularized it in a 15 March 1984 Adweek interview: 'Women have reached a certain point - I call it the glass ceiling.' The mainstream breakthrough came with a March 1986 Wall Street Journal article by Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt titled 'The Glass Ceiling', and Congress institutionalized the metaphor in 1991 by creating the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, whose 1995 report called it an unseen, yet unbreachable barrier. Cambridge records both the general and the specifically workplace senses.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- break the glass ceiling
- crack the glass ceiling
- hit the glass ceiling
Usage Examples
- She hit the glass ceiling twice in a decade, passed over for partner both times by men with thinner files.
- The firm's leadership ranks are half women, which the chief executive cites whenever the glass ceiling question returns.
- Cracking the glass ceiling at the engineering firm took her eleven years and three discrimination complaints.