AKRITI

AMIT
DRISHTI
VISHAL
United States Federal Glass Ceiling
Commission describes it as:

“The unseen, yet unbreachable barrier

that keeps minorities and women from
rising to the upper rungs of the
corporate ladder, regardless of their
qualifications or achievements.”
The problem that laid buried, unspoken for many years in the minds
of the women. A strange string of dissatisfaction occur in women.
Initially it was easy to spot gender discrimination in corporate world .
But today things have been wiped out by increasing awareness .
Still gender inequality occurs in plethora of work practices which
appear to be unbiased .
Examples of invisible and unintentional gender discrimination -
Case of Global Retail company –
 Women's have a lot of responsibility from home and family
 Meetings run in a way that put women in double bind
 Women’s labelled as “control freaks”
Case of investment firm –
 Hiring women from business school did not had any impact
 Most of the women disqualified
 Barriers to women advancement –
Most of the organization have been created by men and are based on
male experiences.
 Men are not to be blamed –
Problem with no name arises from male based culture it does not mean
all men are suppose to be blamed .
 Women blame themselves as per the research
 Just don’t fit in
 Analogy in relation to height:
 Short – Men
 Tall – Women/other minority groups

Approach 1 Approach 2 Approach 3

Assimilate
Minorities forced to
assimilate – adopt to
masculine attributes and
learn the “games their
mothers never taught them”
Accommodate Celebrate
Accommodate unique Forgo assimilation and
needs and situations of accommodation and
women/minorities by celebrate the uniqueness
giving formal mentoring that women/minorities
programs to compensate bring

Celebrate the differences

Minimize their differences
by learning the rules of the
game
Accommodate by making
and create equity by
structural changes to the
putting them in roles which
organization
best suit them
Offer solutions that deal with “symptoms” of gender rather than the “sources of
inequity”

Approach 1 Approach 2 Approach 3

Assimilation
New skills may be
acquired but does not
eradicate the deeply
entrenched systemic
factors
Accommodation Celebration
Gives women stilts to
Telling people to “value
play on the unleveled
differences” doesn’t
field but doesn’t flatten
mean they will
it
Dead-end jobs and
Mismatch of resources reinforce unhelpful
stereotypes
Persistent campaign of incremental changes that discover and destroy the deeply
embedded “roots of discrimination”

Recognize
Diagnosis Talk Experimentation Discuss & Test Small Wins
problem
 Small wins are incremental changes aimed at biases so entrenched in
the system that they’re not even noticed until they’re gone.
 It is a powerful way of chipping away the barriers that hold women
back without sparking kind of sound and fury that scares people into
resistance.
 Small-wins strategy creates change through diagnosis, dialogue, and
experimentation, it usually improves overall efficiency and
performance.
 Beneficial not only to women but to men and the organization as a
whole.
Examples of Women quickly coming up with ideas of small-wins and
implementing them.
-The finance department of a large manufacturing firm – norm of
overdoing work
 Women felt that they had to work extra hard as it was male dominated
industry.
 Men were affected negatively too – Lowered productivity and
dampened enthusiasm.
 Talented people avoided the department because of its overtime
reputation.
Small wins make sense even at companies that have programs
designed to combat gender inequity.
-Case of New York Advertising agency that particularly proud of its
mentoring program aimed at developing high-potential female
leaders:
 Made a part of the mix but still offered job positions (HR) that they
were stereotyped to be “well-suited” for women – high level of skill
but lack rainmaking potential resulted in career disadvantages that
accumulated over time.
 Not saying no to developmental opportunities – seemed gender
neutral
 The HR-type jobs that the women were reluctant to accept were often
critical to overall functioning.
 Women brain stormed and coached one another to respond to HR-
type job offers in ways that would do minimal damage to their career.
 Rainmaking equivalency quotient
They are not random efforts, they unearth and upend systematic
barriers to women’s progress.
1. Small wins tied to the fourth approach help organizations give a
name to practices and assumptions that are so subtle they are rarely
questioned, let alone seen as the root of the organizational
ineffectiveness.
2. Small wins combine changes in the behavior with changes in
understanding.
3. Small wins tie the local to the global.
4. Small wins have a way of snowballing – “feeling comfortable and
fitting the mold”
5. Small wins routs discrimination by fixing the organization, not the
women who work for it. –Yes, something is wrong. It is the
organization itself, and when it is fixed, all will benefit.
New metaphors to capture the subtle, systematic forms of
discrimination that still linger:

-It is not the ceiling that’s holding women back; it’s the whole
structure of the organization in which we work : the foundation,
the beams, the walls, the very airy. The barriers to
advancements are not just above women they are all around
them.
 • Respondents • Collaborations
 Research
Methods 1. Three Fortune 500 1. Robin Ely
Companies 2. Deborah Kolb
1. Interviews 2. Two International 3. Deborah Merrill-Sands
2. Surveys Research
3. Archival Data Organizations
3. Two Public
4. Focus Groups Agencies
5. Observations 4. A global Retail
Organization
5. An Investment
Firm
6. A School
7. A Private
Foundation
 Problem Diagnosis
− Involves senior managers exploring the organizations practices and
beliefs for any source of inequity.

 One on One Interviews with employees

− How works gets done?, What activities are valued? Etc.

 Focus Groups
− For further examination
 Identification of cultural patterns
Ex:
1. Which practices affect men differently from women?
2. Which ones have unintended consequences for the business?
 “Holding up the Mirror”
 Designing Small Wins
− Limited Scope of initiatives as they are guided by managers and
strategically targeted
“Each Small Win is a trial intervention and probe for learning,
intended not to overturn the system but to slowly and surely make it
better”
 One of the most important trait of the Fourth Approach

− The problems are systemic, not Individual

− “Go it Alone” without support of the organizational mandate or
formal change program
− Aimed at subverting the status quo
− Fasters the process for learning and positive change
 Individuals can adopt two methods
1. Conduct a diagnosis ,identify sources of gender discrimination and
design small wins themselves
2. Create a group(internal or external) of like minded people, Discuss
about their workplace, design and execute small wins.
 Executive Education Programs
− Women are encouraged share their experiences and to realize that
these problems are not individual but are actually systemic.
− This helps them to motivate and work on their own and in
collaborations to create small wins tat can make a big difference
THANK YOU