The glass ceiling - Essay Example

Bypassing the Glass Ceiling in Psychology The glass ceiling is something that prevents women professionals from being able to enter in to the highest echelons of a profession. Though recent advancements for women in the workplace have allowed them to achieve higher rates of entrances in various professions, there are various systematic and cultural barriers that prevent women from advancing to the truly highest levels. These systematic barriers include things like minimal maternity leave, allowance for family emergencies and cares, and so on.

The cultural barriers include issues like false perceived superiority of men in administrative and leadership roles, diminishment of women’s voices in decision-making situations and valuation of perceived ‘masculine’ traits, such as, aggression and dominance over perceived ‘feminine’ traits like understanding and patients, especially in highly competitive and political environments. The glass ceiling has a variety of effects on women. The first and most obvious is to subtly exclude them from reaching top positions in their fields.

While a few women do make it into upper management or leadership roles in their fields, the vast majority of most professions, and especially the highest echelons of those professions, remain dominated by men. This process can also create a significant negative impact on a woman’s personal life. Most obviously, professional stalling that occurs when women hit the glass ceiling and are no longer able to advance creates significant emotional problems, such as, professional frustration and decreased self-worth.

Women are often made to make lose-lose choices, for instance, having to decide between having a child, and thus loosing time, energy and prestige at work, or focusing on their careers and losing out on family opportunities – choices men are never forced to make. (For question three, maybe focus on things such as the fact that you can use traditionally feminine traits to be an excellent psychologist, you can side-step traditional hierarchies that exist in other professions, and publish work in a merit-based fashion to achieve prestige without needing to go through patriarchal hierarchies.)