THE organisation that I did my summer internship with has a woman at a vice-chair position on the board. The division that I worked for (covering Asean, Australia and India) had a woman heading it. And yes, my boss was a woman. You would say this is evidence enough that the ‘glass ceiling’ is as prehistoric as the last hand-written letter I received.
But what I state are the exceptions. The rule ? and I met many women who fit that ? are women at positions that fresh recruits like me would slowly grow into: the middle management. Some of them have taken a conscious decision not to pursue their careers as aggressively because they want to maintain a balance between
work and their family or personal life. Some, though they would want to, have not yet made the
cut. Now, is this because of the
glass ceiling?
To climb up the ladder, we need a set of skills, some technical, some soft, some managerial. At every step, we are evaluated by our superiors based on our performance on all parameters and, then, given additional responsibilities or, in common parlance, a promotion. Of course, every individual is different and we do know that there are the ones who are exceptional at their jobs and they go up the fast track in most organisations. If it were that gender did not matter, we should see the same proportion of women at the top as we do men. That is, if women form 33% of the organisation?s workforce, the board or the senior management should also have similar representation. And that, as we all know,
is not what the numbers show. A woman CEO is news for an
entire year!
So, why the low proportion of women at the top? We should naturally include the fact that women did come much later into the workforce and, as we know, getting into the top management of a big multinational will take a minimum of 25 years of work. So, ideally, the proportions we are looking at are of women who came into the workforce in the 1980s, and that would be a dismal number compared to what we see now.
Another factor, as mentioned earlier, is the choice that women make, or as some would say, are forced to make. In the Indian context, this is a very strong factor
as I have seen many a mother (in my previous work experience) refuse a promotion or roles that require travel. I think this is a choice and that
the women who make it are fully aware of their priorities before
doing so. There are men who also make such career choices so that they can maintain a good work-life balance, but that somehow is
taken more like a choice than a forced decision.
The third, and the one factor that I think we have not heard much about, is the glass ceiling inside the woman?s head. The woman has not yet become comfortable with the man?s world that she is in. She does not feel that she fully belongs and, hence, the doubt within. She feels that she has to do more to prove herself because she is a woman and I think that reflects in her lack of belief in being able to get to the top. Of course, there are social prejudices, too, but they are far easier to combat than the ones inside oneself. So, yes, there is a glass ceiling ? and it is the one in our minds.
This is the first in a four-part series by second-year IIM-B students who have completed their summer internships overseas