The Glass Ceiling: Are Women Treated Differently?

Research Paper of Business Ethics

The Glass Ceiling: Are women treated differently?

Kimi Liu

Tutor: Dr. Underwood

Dallas Baptist University

04/15/2013

The Glass Ceiling: Are women treated differently?

I. Introduction

Just as the semantic meaning of glass ceiling, it could be an invisible ceiling upon a building when people look up to enjoy an outlook of sky through the ceiling. As the definition of physical glass ceiling, most businessmen would like to work in a building with a glass ceiling rather than a closed construction simply because they typically prefer to enjoy a natural sky scape while they are working. However, the metaphor of the glass ceiling refers to a generally ethical problem about gender discrimination. As the actual meaning of glass ceiling, it implies some phenomenon that some discriminated groups and especially women who work in organizations suffer from the invisible barrier which prevents women and minorities from promoting into a higher position within organizations (Schmidt, 2010).

In the range of organizational context, when the glass ceiling exists in an organization, women and minorities would be treated unequally compared with other groups which provide supports as same as discriminated groups or people. As a result, the glass ceiling could destroy the expectation of those women or discriminated people to share equal opportunities with others to get promotion within organizations. Although the glass ceiling has become a generally prevalent phenomenon in business field, it is still a hot controversial topic to be argued by someone who claimed that there is no absolute glass ceiling in organizations because women started emerging in more and more advanced ways in business. Someone asserted that the glass ceiling would disappear with the improvement and revolution of management as long as the organizations approach their diverse visions and effective operation system in a well-structured process. For example, more and more females have breaking through the glass ceiling since 2000, in U.S., U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shown that women had already achieved a 48% portion of the labor force compared with men 52% after the continued growth of female labor force; moreover, it means that women are no more minorities in the workplace with pretty much even power (2008). The completely opposite statements conduct distinct opinions about the glass ceiling.

II. Supporting info for proving the existence of Glass Ceiling

In general, the glass