Glass Ceiling Myths

Fem­i­nists want you to believe that the glass ceil­ings are there to keep females from advancing.

Sup­port­ers of his­tor­i­cally sup­pressed races want you to believe that the glass ceil­ings are there to keep mem­bers of the his­tor­i­cally sup­pressed races from advancing.

Ambi­tious, bright young peo­ple want you to believe that the glass ceil­ings are there to keep ambi­tious, bright young peo­ple from advancing.

… want you to believe that the glass ceil­ings are there to keep … from advancing.

They are all full of bullshit.

Why; because there are no glass ceil­ings. The glass is there but it is silvered.

Almost all hir­ing exec­u­tive are look­ing to hire their mir­ror image. For all the crap about “diverse slate of can­di­dates”, when it comes down to it, the behav­ior, the style, the per­son­al­ity of the job can­di­date and how well it matches up the hir­ing man­age­ment team has a whole lot more to do with the selec­tion than the gen­der, the race, the age, the num­ber of tat­toos, the style of hair, the man­ner of speak­ing, … of the job candidate.

Try­ing to break through the glass ceil­ing (the mir­ror) is rather point­less. Your choices are these:

• Go start your own busi­ness (if you have the resources and per­sonal strength, absolutely the best thing to try).
• Find a man­age­ment team that is like you (usu­ally hard to do, but you may get lucky and find a niche where at least the imme­di­ate part of the man­age­ment team is like you — this is my cur­rent situation).
• Try to play the cha­rade, put on the face of the man­age­ment team you are try­ing to impress (you can play this game for a while, but there are only a few indi­vid­u­als with enough guile to keep up this game for long — this approach usu­ally ends in dis­as­ter — often for not only the indi­vid­ual but also for those around them).
• Go ahead and take a ham­mer to the mir­ror (it is your career — I can hon­estly say I have pushed the lim­its of this approach a few times in the past — I don’t think you will like where it takes you — you have to be very quick on your feet to step aside when the ham­mer comes back in your direction).
• Sit back and smile and wait for the man­age­ment team to change and hope that the new one is one that you mesh with bet­ter (bit of advice about jobs — you can change jobs or you can stay and watch the job change around you — don’t ask me which is bet­ter — I just know that both are options).

Remem­ber, the group doing the hir­ing is mak­ing a deci­sion based on noth­ing more than a bunch of bits and pieces of infor­ma­tion held together by a whole lot of per­sonal feel­ings. Don’t for a minute think it isn’t per­sonal. For all the crap the HR Depart­ment and the giant list of lawyers every cor­po­ra­tion has lined up to pro­tect it if you try to file suit, in the end the hir­ing deci­sion comes down to noth­ing more than the feel­ings of the man­age­ment team. They will never admit it, but it is true.

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