Essay: Feminism and the Glass Ceiling

Feminism and the Glass Ceiling

Since WWII, employers in both Canada and the United States have been hiring and training only women for white collar staff and supervisory positions because women cannot be drafted into the military in the event of a major war. During WWII those corporations lost a lot of their staff expertise to the military as their then male employees left for the war so after the war they imposed anti-male hiring policies to preclude similar future staff losses.

It is for this reason and no other that so many white collar corporations in North America have such a high percentage of female white collar workers and this status quo seems likely to remain for some time.

It is also for this reason that the so called "Glass Ceiling" exists. Senior executive males in executive boardrooms were not going to implement hiring policies which gave all the staff and supervisory positions to women as a corporate hiring hedge and then give women all the management and executive positions too. Unfortunately, this looks like a perk of most corporations being lead by men; men lead the corporations hence they do things the way they like.

Small and medium sized businesses notwithstanding, there is little evidence that women are entrepreneurs on the same scale as men. My point: women rarely "think big"; men do it all the time. Ergo, the Ford Motor Companies, Microsofts and Occidental Petroleums of the world will continue to be created by and, as a matter of course, be run by men.

Should any given woman rise to head such a corporation, this new corporate success will bathe in the trite accolades of "trailblazer" and blithely ignore the truth that, in many instances, a score or more of men preceeded her.

Blazer, indeed!

This is almost as thought the newly minted female CEO and her feminist acolytes perceive every corporate entity as having occurred by fate or happenstance, rather like hollyhocks somehow arising metaphysically in the flower garden of business.

Nobody planted them. They have always been there, growing on their own so to speak and this feminist bugaboo known as "equity" dictates that it is about time the women started getting control of some of the things.

This, it seems apparent, is how most women think on a grand, strategic scale. It's women "thinking big".

Feminists, in their sublime self-righteousness then, excoriate the managerial and executive ranks for being mostly male (haven't you heard) and applaud every crack in the glass ceiling. If a man notices the staff and supervisory ranks below the glass ceiling being mostly female he is expected to obligingly ignore it or shut up about it.

In the feminist universe, therefore, what is sauce for the goose is well, um, sauce for the goose. Militancy is a feminist perk just as controlling corporations is a male one. Any contradictory input about gender bias in employment from a recalcitrant gander is scorned as retrograde. The feminists are progressive; if men disagree, they are not.

A concomitant concern of mine is worrying; to wit, today's crop of liberated women might train or coerce the men to think the same way (ie like women, "thinking little"). In such an eventuality, the men of some other society will obliged to think strategically and globally. Having acquiesced to the demanding, tactically thinking and politically correct women of North America and particularly Canada, the men here will no longer know how to do it.

Glenn R. Burger

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