Cracking the Glass Ceiling [Archive.org URL]

Despite the gains made by women in the job market in recent decades, the access of women to the upper levels of the business hierarchy remains limited. A vast literature seeks to explain the barrier to female advancement widely known as the “glass ceiling,” which is regarded as “an egregious denial of social justice,” at least by the U.S. Department of Labor. But the two primary strands of this literature — one using experimental methods and the other using data gleaned from sports events — offer very different conclusions. In this essay, we examine what these studies have added to our understanding of the glass ceiling and point out the limits of the methods that they employ.

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