Women maintain their own glass ceiling

New international study finds that women are partly responsible for keeping the glass ceiling in place:

The 2008 study, part of U.S. behavioral scientist Shannon L. Goodson's new book "The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance," compared almost 11,500 professional women with 16,700 men from 34 countries.

Goodson said professional women in Britain, the United States and China were more likely to promote their interests, whereas women in New Zealand and Sweden are the most timid, followed by Australian and Canadian women.

But overall, women were not doing enough to advance their own careers, she said in a statement.

"Women did not create the glass ceiling, the invisible barrier blamed for limiting their ability to earn what they're worth, but they help maintain it," Goodson said.

Specifically the study found that:

• Women are still reluctant to tout their contributions.
• Women who had managed to climb up the corporate ladder tended to "take the ladder with them," sometimes even sabotaging the chances of other female workers seeking promotion.
• As a result, many women preferred male managers as they were viewed as more even minded.

Ouch!  Ladies, what's up with that?  I've heard the stories, and even seen it in action, but I thought we were finally beyond that.  So, tell us what you think via our poll and the comments below?

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Comments

[Karyn Beach]

Yes. We women definitely have a harder time tooting our own horns. It seems like an area where our progress is still lacking. I think some times we don't acknowledge our successes, which makes it harder later when it comes time to tout them. To overcome this, I keep a running list of things I've accomplished as well as a folder called Kudos for when I get compliments from coworkers and superiors on my work. This makes it easy to toot my own horn.

BEEP! BEEP! :)

[Susan Hammond]

Early in my career I had the misfortune of working for a Queen Bee. She hired me to succeed her when she was promoted and then when the time came hired a man. Rather than be bitter I vowed I would not do the samething to other women. This incident was part of my inspiration to co-found organizations that support and promote women business owners. Sometimes you just have to make lemonade!

[Jane Sanders]

This is definitely a valid issue. Training can help...assertiveness, gender communication (to learn how to communicate more effectively with men and high-level women with a masculine style), and self-promotion. Mentoring can make a positive impact as well. Generally speaking, men use the 80/20 rule - 80% of their time at work is spent working, and 20% is used to self-promote. Women, we can DO this!

[Wendy]

The short version of a very long story; I interviewed with only women; I was hired by and reported to women. Found out that a man who started the same day was making 10K more. His claim to fame was being a former ice skating coach; I was a former bank branch manager who had completed an executive training program. When was the last time you went into HR and saw a man??? Yet women get paid less.

[Cindy Carpenter]

I think women tend to expect that other women will be supportive, so bad situations with female colleagues have a double impact; we forget how many times we've had similarly bad situations with male colleagues, because they're not as surprising. The poll reflects this bias - it should ask the same question about sabotage by men. In my own career, I can point to a couple times when I've been undermined by a female colleague, but I can think of many more times when I was undermined by a male colleague. Business is a often a competitive sport, and being of the same gender does not necessarily mean you are on the same team.

[Diane K. Danielson]

@Wendy - Great point about HR. Never thought of it that way.

@Cindy - good point too. We did consider how to include that in a yes or no poll, but couldn't find a good way. And I like your premise that it's doubly bad because you expect their support.

However, that's actually not why I personally recall the women's sabotage more than the men, it's because the women's sabotage that I experienced was much more underhanded, and in one instance by a woman whose career should have had nothing to do with mine (i.e. there was no point at all to it, which was why it backfired). The men were just flat out, in your face, competing in the boardroom (or trying to exclude all women from the boardroom), and therefore any "sabotage" was NOT targeted at me as an individual, and easily anticipated and therefore easier to deal with. So, perhaps I never really thought to classify that as "sabotage."

Also, I have had several women "angels" come in and help me over the years in far greater numbers than the women who did the opposite. Hopefully we can help raise awareness of how we can all help each other.

This is why we want people to comment here. It brings up new and different viewpoints.

[Jeanne Johnson]

I can't help but wonder how much a lack of competition training as kids adds to the issues. Boys learn from an early age to compete on the sporting fields and let rivalrous and cntemptuous feelings go to a degree when they leave the game. I came from an era where girls only competed for 2 things: a boys attention and a spot on the cheerleading squad. Both of those contests were often not handled in a healthy way. Take that manipulative experience and hone those skills over 20 years and that's often what you face with a female in power. My hope is that Title 9 for women athletes we will create a new generation of women who can work hard play/hard and view other women as colleagues rather than interlopers.

[Diane K. Danielson]

@Jeanne - You are so singing my song. I definitely noticed a difference between women I hired who were Title 9 beneficiaries and their colleagues who weren't. I once did a poll of all my closest "female business colleagues". Almost all of them were athletes at some point in time (or if not given the opportunity, i.e. pre-Title 9, they seemed to come from competitive families with lots of brothers). I was a very early beneficiary of Title 9 (grew up in the 1970s in a very progressive town), and I think it helped me tremendously in business.

[Jaye]

I've had five different women snake me.

First one: I was so busy running my dept.'s budget and operations that I allowed my assistant be the one to spend time learning computers: actually she got not only me, but every other person (95% women at the time) not in an advanced role in our dept. She was supposed to be using her time to learn so that she good share that knowledge and teach others. Do you think that happened? NO! But she did get a higer paying job and left us to figure out things by ourselves.

2nd one: Along with my previous VP (a male who was leaving because the new prez had followed him into his/her previous job, was jealous of him, hated him for some reason I've never known and he saw the writing on the wall) and director, I'd prepared a job description to lead what was a new client services & marketing (although the word "marketing" was not understood in my organization at the time, nor actually for a long time afterwards) division in my dept. Got the new VP, a friend of the new prez, who made "friends" with one of the writers who'd not been around very long before he got there. I took the 4th of July weekend off. When I came back from vacation, a person who didn't know how to speak to others was my boss, supposedly filling the functions I'd documented -- the writer. Did I mention the writer and the VP had a little affair? But the truth is that she was better at politics than I am and after I'd taught her customer service and marketing, she turned out to be pretty decent. Still there was that initial underhanded way of doing things.

Third: Oh! This one replaced #2 when #2 left the org. to be a F-T mother. #3 went to all kinds of meetings taking credit for things I'd done, ideas I had, plus blaming things she'd screwed up with on me (more than one of those last she even put in my yearly review to which I provided a rebuttal with damning evidence -- she ended up working from another home in another state -- 'nuf said?). I only found about how often the lies were perpetrated long after we had yet another VP from whom I heard all the innovative, creative, successful things that #3 supposedly had done which just left me with my mouth hanging open because I was so shocked she'd lied so often and people who should have known better had bought those lies so often.

Fourth: I can't even begin to properly explain the way she speaks down to staff and others in the home office and throughout the country. Having to listen to her doing that to an AA in a cube near my office was terribly painful. She's not even very bright for heaven's sake. And that's not the half of it. I was bringing in all kinds of money our company had never seen before and she felt I was wasting my time doing that. According to her, I should have been updating -- and, get this, having 200 copies actually printed -- on paper, mind you -- out, a manual that other director-level and regional staff would not allow to be distributed -- every single year. And yes we did have an internal internet (intranet).

Result: I took an early retirement so I wouldn't have a heart attack in front of my friends and coworkers.

Quite a few of you are making excuses for women who weren't of the Title 9 era, but I'm imagining you're a tad younger than I am. The women I'm talking about are so far beyond the take-no-prisoners, etc., attitude that it appears you believe boys just learn because "they're there." I'm talking about evil people and they come in both sexes. Please let's not defend those of our own sex. It's not a sex thing!

[Diane Danielson]

@jaye Wow, you met some doozies. And you make a good point, we shouldn't make excuses for any group of people and it's not limited to gender, and we need to call out the individuals who do this.

As a side note we will be running a similar survey re: whether women have had men sabatoge them as other readers have pointed out that they have had similar experiences with men.