Glass Ceiling

Working women who have looked with resentment through the glass ceiling for decades will find no solace in Kathleen Reardon's new book, "They Don't Get It, Do They?" (Little, Brown). "There's this perception that if you crack through the glass ceiling, it's all going to be wonderful. Well, that's baloney," says Reardon, a USC management professor who also works as a business consultant and heads the Presidential Fellows Program in USC's Leadership Institute.

Cheryl Paller worries that she has two strikes against her that could preclude an ascent to the upper echelons of banking: She's female and she's unconventional. It's not that Paller hasn't had successes as a banker. She has risen to the rank of vice president at four financial institutions, including her present employer, Bank of America. But the top spots in banking are still elusive to women.

In 1973, the Hollywood Reporter published the findings of a secret Writers Guild of America survey showing that women had written less than 2% of the scripts over an entire TV season. In the wake of the furor that followed, Reporter publisher Tichi Wilkerson-Kassel gathered a small group of women in her office for an informal lunchtime meeting to brainstorm how to begin making the scales tip more favorably in the distaff direction.

When she visits home, there are times when Reiko wants to blurt out, "You're wasting your lives." Instead, she listens quietly to her Japanese friends chatter on about their favorite trendy restaurant, their next vacation and their dead-end "office lady" jobs. And she gives thanks, privately of course, that she has a very different blueprint for her future. All it took was moving 6,500 miles away.

Laura Ziskin, a veteran film producer who helped break Hollywood's glass ceiling for women, has died. She was 61. Ziskin died Sunday of breast cancer at her home in Los Angeles, said a spokesman at Sony Pictures, where she had a producing deal and made many of her movies in recent years. Ziskin, who had fought a seven-year battle with the disease, also founded a nonprofit televised event, Stand Up to Cancer, that has raised more than $200 million for cancer research. Best known for producing all the films in the "Spider-Man" franchise — including the upcoming release "The Amazing Spider-Man" — Ziskin had a profound effect on what contemporary moviegoers watch.

In 1982, Judy Hofflund became the first woman to work in the Creative Artists Agency mailroom--an opportunity that opened up when agent Cheryl Peterson protested at a company retreat that that legendary path of upward mobility was an all-male domain. The company line had been that the hours were long, the work very physical and deliveries of film cans had to be made in "bad" neighborhoods late at night. Hofflund managed nonetheless.

Calling all upper crusts. "Mr. and Mrs. Oscar de la Renta and the Thirteen/WNET Gala Committee invite you to salute a cast of legendary talent," said the invitation to a black-tie fund-raising dinner and dance at the Plaza on behalf of New York City's high-profile public-television station earlier this summer. Peter Duchin and his orchestra would provide the music for these society swells. Table cost: $1,000 to $25,000.

During a Town Hall speech in Los Angeles last year, Betty Friedan sounded that oft-repeated call for women to rise and "shatter the glass ceiling." Somewhere in that crowd, a feminist was born. Susan Harris, who had worked for 15 years in oil companies and law firms, was so inspired by the popular epigram that she commissioned an artist to create a literal interpretation of it. The result: "The Glass Ceiling . . . Shatter It!"