Death of a Metaphor

Feminists argue that women are not their own barriers to advancement. They blame the situation of women not being competitively active in the traditional workforce to the concept of “glass ceiling,” a metaphor that represents the gender biased condition where the workplace is more conducive to men and unwelcoming to women.

According to feminists, to “break the glass ceiling,” and thereby find upward mobility in the workplace, women have to overcome the codes and models of traditional workplaces that were fashioned for men’s needs, without input from women.

Traditional employment implies that employers don’t always look first at women when hiring or promoting because women want different things from their jobs. While men are driven to look at salary and chances for advancement, women look more often for meaning, satisfaction, flexibility and personal development – putting money and promotions further down the list of priorities.

The ‘glass ceiling’ came into being because of the traditional implication that women, in general, lack the “hunger” for promotion, making them less competitive, thereby not useful for corporate advancement.

To put it in simpler terms, the corporate rat race to the top mostly has male rats because the female rats are usually impeded by the proverbial glass ceiling that they first have to break if they are so predisposed to join the male rats in the rat race.

I will surely earn the ire of the feminists out there, but will nonetheless say that if women are interested in a career, they won’t have time for children; and if they’re bent on rearing children, they won’t have the time, effort, and imagination for getting to the top of a career. The notion that domestic engineering is a career in itself is purposely not used here. By career, I mean the work that a woman does outside of home management.

Hence, it is the female instinct to be more interested in having a family rather than join the competitive workforce that’s really the reason why we don’t see many women at the top of traditional careers. The biological calling supersedes any gender biased constrictions of the workplace as being the reason why women do not advance to the hilt in their careers. Sooner or later, most women will opt out of the workplace, or slacken on the workplace ambition, to raise a family.

This harks back to the question as to why women didn’t create civilizations. While men marched on to conquer territory and widen empires, as well as slew to guard the ramparts, women were left at home to take care of the brood and the flock. The argument that women did not establish civilizations is as debatable as the one about men unable to learn how to change diapers. Without homes, brood, and flock, the men wouldn’t have had a civilization to build on.

Superwoman must be single. And she chose to stay that way.

Had she decided to have kids, then she might claim to be a Superwoman as Mom. But, as we all know by now, this one will not keep her Superwoman title for long. Being a SuperMom and getting to the top of a career (as we traditionally know careers to be) do not mix.

Thus, the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” is dead.

And a dead metaphor is moot.

The glass ceiling metaphor was created and written by utterly ambitious men who did not want more participants in the rat race. That’s all there is to it. And, of course, (as usual) it’s been propagated by male-bashing feminists who are really men in drag.