Glass Ceiling

It's official. The Glass Ceiling exists. This is not news to a lot of people who have lumps from bumping against it, but now the Bush Administration has certified that women and minorities have trouble moving up in corporate America. Labor Secretary Lynn Martin recently announced the results of a government study showing that the roadblocks faced by women and members of minority groups are pervasive, not figments of some feminist imagination.

Joline Godfrey of Ojai has a solution for the "glass ceiling" that's keeping women from being fully represented in the top echelons of corporate America: Forget trying to break it down, get out from under it instead. Godfrey, 42, is the author of "Our Wildest Dreams: Women Entrepreneurs Making Money, Having Fun, Doing Good" (HarperCollins, 1992), which is cementing her role as one of the most visible spokeswomen for a growing movement--women who have gone into business for themselves.

For eight years, Faith Barnese has been part of a running joke that typifies the plight of many women working in Southern California's automotive industry. The national sales manager for Grant Products, a Glendale maker of automobile accessories, Barnese in 1990 met with a group of warehouse distributors--all men--at a trade conference to tell them about her company's product line. She bumped into one of the distributors on her return visit to the conference the following year.

Maria Contreras-Sweet steps deftly across wet green metal grids at 7-Up/RC Bottling Co. of Southern California. Wearing 2 1/2-inch heels, a white hair net and safety goggles, she helps conduct a tour through the boom-box-loud plant where soda bottles and cans whiz by like toy trains. Amazingly, Contreras-Sweet does not once lose her footing and sink through the grid. But then sidestepping obstacles is her particular talent.

A group of more than 200 African-American employees of Southern California Edison Corp. has filed formal complaints with state and federal agencies charging that the utility has been unfair in hiring and promoting blacks. Complaining that few blacks have "broken the glass ceiling" to enter top-management ranks, Employees United for Equality is asking the California Public Utilities Commission to bar rate increases by Edison until the company is in full compliance with equal-opportunity laws.

Women in the film and television business are moving into more powerful decision-making jobs, but they are still not represented at the highest levels of most companies, according to a study conducted by Women in Film to be released today. "The 'glass ceiling' has cracked, but it's still there," said Sally Steenland, who surveyed 20 companies and wrote the report.

Despite gains over the past year, only one out of every 50 of the top-paid executives at the nation's biggest companies is a woman, according to a first-of-a-kind study released Thursday. Yet the study also showed that a larger, albeit modest, number of women has landed high-ranking corporate officer jobs that eventually could be springboards into the top echelons of America's Fortune 500 businesses.

Despite some progress in recent years, the "glass ceiling" is still an obstacle that keeps all but a few women from reaching senior management positions in major corporations. That's according to a recent report from the International Labor Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes standards for workplace rights and occupational safety. "Women have been moving steadily into occupations, professions and managerial jobs previously reserved for men," the report said.

The informal "glass ceiling" blocking women and minorities from the president's chair in American corporations won't be shattered any time soon because few of them hold the sales, marketing and production jobs that eventually lead to the top of the business world, a bipartisan federal commission will report today.