Glass ceiling

Marilyn Loden coined the phrase "glass ceiling" during a discussion panel called "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" at the 1978 Women's Exposition, a feminist conference held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Loden, then an HR professional at New York Telephone Co., was a last-minute substitute for the company's only female vice president. The other panelists focused on how women limited their own aspirations. Loden redirected the conversation to structural barriers, including biased attitudes from male managers, unequal pay, and a lack of role models, and named those barriers with a phrase she later said came to her spontaneously.

The phrase entered print in a 1984 AdWeek profile of Gay Bryant, then editor of Working Woman magazine, and Merriam-Webster dates its first written appearance to that year. A 1986 Wall Street Journal article by Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt, headlined "The Glass Ceiling," brought the concept to a national business audience. The Wall Street Journal later reported that a similar phrase may have been used at a 1979 dinner conversation between two female employees at Hewlett-Packard, though Loden is generally credited as the originator.

In 1991, Congress established the Glass Ceiling Commission, chaired by the Secretary of Labor, to study barriers to the advancement of women and minorities in corporate leadership. The commission's 1995 final report found that women held only three to five percent of senior management positions in Fortune 1000 and Fortune 500 companies. The concept has since been extended to describe barriers facing racial minorities, leading to related terms including "bamboo ceiling" for barriers facing East Asian professionals and "concrete ceiling" for the compounded obstacles facing women of color.