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THE GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS
A Comparative Study of the
United States, Sweden, and Australia
JANEEN BAXTER
University of Tasmania
ERIK OLIN WRIGHT
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The general-case glass ceiling hypothesis states that not only is it more difficult for women than for men
to be promoted up levels of authority hierarchies within workplaces but also that the obstacles women
face relative to men become greater as theymove up the hierarchy. Gender-based discrimination in promotions
is not simply present across levels of hierarchy but is more intense at higher levels. Empirically,
this implies that the relative rates of women being promoted to higher levels compared to men should
decline with the level of the hierarchy. This article explores this hypothesis with data from three countries:
the United States, Australia, and Sweden. The basic conclusion is that while there is strong evidence
for a general gender gap in authority—the odds of women having authority are less than those of
men—there is no evidence for systematic glass ceiling effects in the United States and only weak evidence
for such effects in the other two countries.
The “glass ceiling” is one of the most compelling metaphors for analyzing inequalities
between men and women in the workplace. The expression has been used
widely in the popular media as well as in official government reports and academic
publications (Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration 1994; Catalyst 1990;
Garland 1991; Scandura 1992; State ofWisconsin Task Force on the Glass Ceiling
Initiative 1993; U.S. Department of Labor 1991). The image suggests that although
it may nowbe the case thatwomen are able to get through the front door of managerial
hierarchies, at some point they hit an invisible barrier that blocks any further
upward movement. As one of the early writers who used the metaphor commented,
the glass ceiling is “a transparent barrier that kept women from rising above a
275
AUTHOR’S NOTE: We thank Mark Western for his invaluable help on various aspects of the data
analysis in this project and Rob Mare for his patient help in sorting out the demographic issues in using
static distributions to estimate transition rates. Bob Hauser and Rachel Rosenfeld also provided helpful
comments.
REPRINTREQUESTS: Erik Olin Wright, Department of Sociology, University ofWisconsin–Madison,
WI 53706; e-mail: wright@ssc.wisc.edu.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 14 No. 2, April 2000 275-294
© 2000 Sociologists for Women in Society
certain level in corporations. . . . It applies to women as a group who are kept from
advancing higher because they are women” (Morrison et al. 1987, 13).
Taken literally, the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” implies the existence of an
impermeable barrier that blocks the vertical mobility ofwomen: Belowthis barrier,
women are able to get promoted; beyond this barrier, they are not. Such a situation
can be considered the limiting case of a more general phenomenon: situations in
which the disadvantages women face relative to men intensify as they move up
organizational hierarchies. In the case of the literal use of the glass ceiling metaphor,
this intensification takes the form of a simple step function; in the more general
case, the intensification of disadvantage could occur in several steps and come
in varying degrees.1 Throughout this article, we will use the expression “glass ceiling”
to cover this more general case. Our objective is to test whether glass ceilings
are present in this looser definition of the term.2
The glass ceiling metaphor as we will use it is thus not simply a description of
an outcome—that there are disproportionately few women at the top of organizations—
nor is it simply a claim that discrimination againstwomen is pervasive at all
levels of managerial hierarchies. It is a specific claim that the obstacleswomen face
to promotion relative to men systematically increase as theymove up the hierarchy.
Of course, obstacles to promotion may also increase for men as they move up the
hierarchy, but the idea of a glass ceiling implies that barriers to promotion intensify
more for women than for men. Employers and top managers may be willing to let
women occupy the lower reaches of the managerial structure, but—the argument
goes—they obstruct the access of women to positions of “real” power. As a result,
women are largely denied promotions to the higher levels of management. Many
different concrete mechanisms may be responsible for this obstruction: oldfashioned
sexism, women managers’ isolation from important informal networks,
or more subtle sexist attitudes that placewomen at a disadvantage. But whatever the
specific mechanism, the glass ceiling hypothesis argues that the relative disadvantages
women face in getting jobs and promotions are greater in the upper levels of
managerial hierarchies than at the bottom.
The metaphor of the glass ceiling seems to be confirmed by casual observation.
It does not take systematic research to notice that a much higher proportion of bottom
supervisors than of chief executive officers are women. Data from the comparative
project in class analysis (Wright 1989, 1997) indicate that at the bottom of
managerial hierarchies in most economically developed countries, around 25 to 30
percent of lower-level supervisors are women. In contrast, at most a small percentage
of top executives and CEOs in large corporations are women. According to
Fierman (1990), fewer than 0.5 percent of the 4,012 highest paid managers in top
companies in the United States are women, while fewer than 5 percent of senior
management in the Fortune 500 corporations are women and minorities. Reskin
and Padavic (1994, 84) report that “althoughwomen held half of all federal government
jobs in 1992 and made up 86 percent of the government’s clerical workers,
they were only a quarter of supervisors and only a tenth of senior executives.” Similar
patterns occur in other countries: In Denmark, women were 14.5 percent of all
276 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
managers and administrators but only between 1 and 5 percent of top managers; in
Japan,women were 7.5 percent of all administrators and managers but only 0.3 percent
of top management in the private sector (Reskin and Padavic 1994). The report
of the State ofWisconsin Task Force on the Glass Ceiling Initiative (1993, 9) states
that while 47 percent of supervisors and 42 percent of middle management inWisconsin
were women, only 34 percent of upper management and 18 percent of
executives were women. A 1991 U.S. Department of Labor “Report on the Glass
Ceiling Initiative” makes similar observations: In 94 randomly sampled reviews of
corporate headquarters of Fortune 1000 sized companies between 1989 and 1991,
women were found to represent 37.2 percent of all employees of these companies
yet only 16.9 percent of all levels of management and 6.6 percent of managers at the
executive level. Such distributions would surprise no one, and they lend considerable
credibility to the claim that women indeed do face a glass ceiling.
However, things may not be what they seem. A simple arithmetic example will
clarify the point. Suppose, as illustrated in Table 1, there is a managerial hierarchy
with six levels. In the first example in this illustration, 50 percent of men but only 25
percent ofwomen get promoted at each level (i.e., men have twice the probability of
being promoted than women at every level of the hierarchy). Discrimination, at
least as measured by relative probabilities of promotion, is thus constant across levels
of the hierarchy. In this situation, if roughly 25 percent of line supervisors are
women, only 1 percent of top managers will be women. In the second example, the
ratio of the probabilities of men getting promoted towomen getting promoted actually
becomes steadily more egalitarian as you move up the hierarchy. This ratio is
2:1 for promotions into line supervisor positions but declines to only 1.16:1 for promotions
to the top manager position.Yet even in this situation, the proportion of top
managers who are women is strikingly less than the proportion of supervisors who
are women: 6 percent compared to about 25 percent.3
Neither of these two examples is properly described as reflecting a “glass ceiling”
as we are using the term. The glass ceiling hypothesis suggests that the barriers
to managerial promotions become increasingly severe forwomen compared to men
as theymove up the hierarchy. In the two examples just reviewed, however, the disadvantageswomen
face relative to men are either constant as theymove up the hierarchy
(case 1), or they actually decrease (case 2). And yet, in both cases, there are
almost no women top managers. The cumulative effect of declining discrimination
can still produce an increasing “gender gap in authority” as one moves to the top of
organizational hierarchies. Thus, the existence of a glass ceiling cannot be inferred
simply from the sheer fact that a much smaller proportion of people at the top echelons
of organizations are women than at the bottom levels.
To prove the existence of a glass ceiling, it is thus necessary to demonstrate two
things: (1) that the ratio of the probabilities of women compared to men being promoted
into or entering a given level of management declines as they move up the
managerial hierarchy and (2) that this deterioration in relative promotion probabilities
is due to intensified barriers to promotion as opposed to some other mechanism.
If, for example, women disproportionately self-select into occupations or organiza-
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 277
tions with limited possibilities of vertical promotion for everyone in such jobs, and
if this accounts for the pattern of gender differences in promotion rates across hierarchical
levels, then the process would not properly be described as involving a
glass ceiling (intensification of barriers). Occupational and organizational sex segregation,
even self-segregation, may reflect various forms of gender discrimination
in the society at large, but the mechanisms involved are different from those identified
with the glass ceiling.
The central objective of this article is to provide a preliminary exploration of the
central empirical prediction of the glass ceiling hypothesis that the ratio of probabilities
of women compared to men being promoted up managerial hierarchies
declines with hierarchical level. Given the salience of the metaphor in public discussions
of gender inequality, it might have been expected that there would be a
substantial body of quantitative research systematically exploring the extent and
variations in the glass ceiling. While there are numerous studies documenting the
gender gap in authority (Gradolph et al. 1994; Hultin 1996; Ishida 1994 [*1995 IN
REFERENCES*]; Jacobs 1992; Jaffee 1989; Reskin and Roos 1992; Rosenfeld,
278 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
TABLE 1: Hypothetical Example Showing How There Can Be Very Few Women Top
Managers and Gender Discrimination without a “Glass Ceiling”
Promotion Rates
Number of to Next Hierarchy Level
People in Level (in percentages)
Percentage
Managerial Level Men Women of Women Men Women Ratio
Constant intensity of
discrimination up
the hierarchy
Top managers 100 1 1
Manager level 4 200 4 2 50 25 2:1
Manager level 3 400 16 4 50 25 2:1
Manager level 2 800 64 7.5 50 25 2:1
Manager level 1 600 256 14 50 25 2:1
Line supervisor 3,000 1,024 24 50 25 2:1
Nonmanagement 6,400 4,096 42 50 25 2:1
Declining intensity of
discrimination up
the hierarchy
Top managers 100 6 6
Manager level 4 200 14 6.5 50 43 1.16:1
Manager level 3 400 36 8.3 50 40 1.25:1
Manager level 2 800 98 11 50 37 1.35:1
Manager level 1 600 297 15.7 50 33 1.52:1
Line supervisor 3,200 1,024 24 50 29 1.72:1
Nonmanagement 6,400 4,096 42 50 25 2.00:1
Van Buren, and Kalleberg 1994 [*1998 IN REFERENCES*]; Tomaskovic-Devey
1993; Wright and Baxter 1995) and many reports and investigations that purport to
study the glass ceiling (Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration 1994; State of
Wisconsin Task Force on the Glass Ceiling Initiative 1993), virtually none of this
research addresses the specific empirical question of how the relative probabilities
of women and men being promoted into or entering a given level of management
change as one moves up the hierarchy. This is a key issue since it potentially identifies
the most important point of focus for those concerned with women’s lack of
representation in senior management. If it is the case, for example, that the gendered
barriers to promotion do significantly intensify at a specific level of the hierarchy,
then this highlights an important site for political action. On the other hand, if
the barriers to promotion for women relative to men are equally rigid at all levels of
the hierarchy, then this suggests that political efforts should perhaps concentrate
more at the bottom of hierarchies since this will affect the lives and opportunities of
more women than at higher levels.
The research reported in this article explores variations in the gender gap in
authority by hierarchical level in three developed capitalist economies—the United
States, Sweden, and Australia. The central question we ask is this: Does the probability
of women being promoted into a given level of the authority hierarchy relative
to men decline as one moves up the hierarchy? The comparative setting of the
analysis serves two purposes: First, the three analyses can be viewed as replications
of each other. The glass ceiling hypothesis is not a special hypothesis for the United
States but a quite general hypothesis about the patterns of gender discrimination in
organizational hierarchies. If this hypothesis is robust, it would be expected to
occur in all three of these countries, although the pattern and magnitudes of the
glass ceiling effects might differ. Second, earlier work (Wright and Baxter 1995)
has demonstrated that on a variety of measures, the gender gap in authoritywas significantly
greater in Sweden than in either the United States or Australia. In this
article, we examine if there are also indications of stronger glass ceiling effects in
Sweden as well. Such a result would not only lend credence to our earlier findings
butwould also have implications for understanding the impact of differing political
strategies on eradicating gender inequality in workplaces.
DATA
The data for this article come from the Comparative Class Analysis Project
(Wright 1989, 1997). Two cross-sectional surveys are available in three of the original
countries involved in this project: the United States (1980 and 1991), Australia
(1986 and 1993), and Sweden (1980 and 1995) (see Table 2). For purposes of the
analytical objectives of this article, the samples have been restricted to employees
(thus excluding the self-employed, the unemployed, and people out of the labor
force). Because the national surveys differed somewhat in the age range of their
samples,wehave restricted the samples to respondents between the ages of 19 and 64.
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 279
To increase the sample size, especially for the upper levels of the managerial
hierarchies, we have combined the two data sets within each country. We then
tested to see if there were any interactions between gender and time (coded as a
dichotomy to distinguish the first and second surveys in each country).4 In all three
countries, these time-by-gender interaction coefficients were statistically insignificant
(at even the 0.1 level of significance) for all of the analyses we conducted.We
thus will not include the gender-by-time interaction terms in any of the analyses
that follow.5
STRATEGY OF ANALYSIS
The data we use enable us to classify employees in the labor force into six hierarchical
levels:
0 = nonmanagement
1 = supervisors
2 = lower managers
3 = middle managers
4 = upper managers
5 = top managers
Let the probability of a woman currently in level n being promoted from level n to
level n + 1 be Pr(W:n→n + 1) and the probability of a man being so promoted be
Pr(M:n → n + 1). The glass ceiling hypothesis predicts that the ratio of these two
probabilities—Pr(W:n→n + 1)/Pr(M:n→n + 1)—declines as n increases. If there
were no gender differences in promotion possibilities, then these probabilities
would be the same and thus the ratio 1. If therewas pervasive gender discrimination
but its intensity did not increase with hierarchical level, then this ratio would be
constant across values of n. The methodological problem, then, is how to get reasonable
estimates of these gender-by-level promotion probabilities.
280 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
TABLE 2: The Sample
Interview Sample Size (after restricting
Country Date Method to employees between ages 19 and 65)
United States 1980 Telephone 1,194
United States 1991 Telephone 1,387
Australia 1986 Personal 1,013
Australia 1993 Mail 1,308
Sweden 1980 Mail/telephone 996
Sweden 1995 Mail/telephone 991
Several features of the process by which people are allocated to positions in
authority hierarchies make calculating these probabilities difficult. These include
nonstandardization of hierarchies across organizations, variations in the ways in
which individuals move into and out of organizational levels, historical legacies of
previous allocation rules and changes in gender-specific labor force participation
rates, and unmeasured differences in employee quality (see methodological appendix
for further discussion of these issues). These complexities may make the use of
cross-sectional data quite problematic for the tasks at hand. Since we know that
labor force participation rates of women have been increasing rapidly in recent
years and that the proportion of all jobs that are located within managerial hierarchies
has also been increasing (Wright 1997, chap. 3), cross-sectional data will
almost certainly generate biased estimates of gender-specific promotion
probabilities.
Despite these biases, we believe that cross-sectional data can potentially provide
suggestive evidence relevant to the glass ceiling hypothesis. If it is the case that the
biggest sources of likely bias in the estimates will tend to exaggerate the appearance
of a glass ceiling, then the data analysis could be quite compelling if it fails to demonstrate
the existence of glass ceiling effects. By far the biggest bias in estimates of
gender-specific promotion rates from cross-sectional data is likely to be generated
by the very rapid rate of increase in women’s labor force participation and historic
legacies of past discrimination. Since it takes time for expanded cohorts of women
to work their way up hierarchies even in the absence of a glass ceiling, rapid
increases in labor force participation will result in disproportionate numbers of
women in the lower levels of hierarchies and will thus tend to generate the appearance
of a glass ceiling even if none in fact exists. If, therefore, despite this bias, we
fail to observe a glass ceiling in cross-sectional data, thiswould constitute credible,
if still tentative, evidence against the glass ceiling hypothesis. On this assumption,
then, we will use cross-sectional data of the distribution of men and women across
levels of authority hierarchies in work as a suggestive test of the glass ceiling
hypothesis.
The Basic Model: The Adjacent-Level Model
Our primary model for exploring the glass ceiling hypothesis will be based on a
series of logistic regressions that estimate, for people in adjacent levels of the
authority hierarchy (level n and n + 1), odds ratios for a gender-independent variable
predicting whether a person is in the higher of the two levels:
Log [Pr(n + 1)/Pr(n)] = an + BnFemale, (1)
where Pr(n) is the probability of being in level n of the hierarchy, Pr(n + 1) is the
probability of being in level n + 1, and the subscript n indicates that the coefficients
in the equation are for the contrast between level n and n + 1. (To estimate this equation,
the sample is restricted to people in the two adjacent categories.) The
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 281
coefficient Bn, then, is a measure of the “gender gap in authority” at level n. If this
coefficient is negative, then the odds of a woman being in the higher of the two levels
is less than the odds of a man being in that level; if the coefficient is zero, there is
no gender gap at all; if it is positive, there is a gender gap in favor of women. Thus,
for example, when n = 0, the gender coefficient indicates the log of the odds ratio of
women compared to men being supervisors rather than nonmanagement. The antilog
of this coefficient is the odds ratio of a woman compared to a man being in the
higher-level category.
If the glass ceiling hypothesis is correct and if these odds ratios adequately map
gender differences in promotion probabilities, then at some point as n increases, the
coefficient for the gender variable should become significantly more negative than
at lower values of n.6 If the glass ceiling hypothesis is taken literally as indicating
that an almost impermeable barrier suddenly appears at upper levels of the hierarchy,
then the coefficients measuring the gender gap in authority might be modestly
negative for n = 0, 1, 2, 3 and then suddenly jump to a large negative coefficient at
n = 4 or 5. Ifwe relax the meaning of the hypothesis, then it simply suggests that the
coefficientswould tend to be more negative at higher levels than at lower levels of n.
Because of the small sample sizes, especially for people at the higher levels of
organizational hierarchies, unless there are huge differences in the Bn coefficients
across levels of n, it will be difficult to formally test the statistical significance of
these differences, particularly since the standard errors in tests of differences
among regression coefficients are larger than the standard errors of the original
coefficients. In general, therefore, we will rely more on observations of the pattern
of coefficients than on formal statistical tests of their differences. If it turns out that
some of these patterns are consistent with the glass ceiling hypothesis, we will conduct
formal tests to establish our level of confidence in the results.7
Controls for Individual and Job Attributes
It is always possible that part or all of the gender gap in authority as measured by
the gender coefficient in equation (1) is the result not of gender per se but of various
personal and job attributes correlated with gender. Such attributes could have the
effect of spuriously heightening or dampening the gender coefficient. For example,
suppose that because of discrimination in getting into positions of authority, on
average, at any level of the authority hierarchy, women are better qualified than
men. If gender discrimination is real, then this is one of the things onewould expect
(i.e., a woman would have to be more qualified in various ways to get a promotion
than a man). If this were the case, then controlling for qualifications should, if anything,
increase the absolute value of the negative coefficient for gender at higher
levels of the authority hierarchy. That is, the gender gap in authority will be bigger
when qualifications are included in the equation than when they are not. This could
mean that a glass ceiling might not appear to be present in equation (1)—the Bn
coefficients for high n and lown might be same—but when the controls are added in
equation (2), the Bn coefficients for high values of n might become significantly
more negative.
282 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
On the other hand, there may be attributes of women that, when held constant,
would reduce the gender gap in authority.Women are more likely towork part-time
than are men, and part-timeworkers are less likely to be promoted than are full-time
workers, not because of gender-specific reasons but because of the organizational
costs of promoting part-time managers.8 Similarly, women are more likely to work
for the state than are men, and there are proportionately fewer upper-level managers
in state organizations than in private corporations. If such factors were included in
an equation as controls, therefore, the magnitude of the gender gap should decrease.
Some of the apparent gender gap in authority as measured in equation (1) would be
the result of the distribution of women into work settings with fewer managerial
opportunities rather than any gender-specific obstacles to their acquiring managerial
positions within their workplaces. It is therefore important to estimate a second
set of logistic regressions in which a range of individual and job attributes are
included as controls:
Log [Pr(n + 1)/Pr(n)] = an + BnFemale + ΣiBniXi, (2)
where theXi are the various compositional controls listed in Table 3.9 The Bn coefficients
in these equations will be referred to as the “net gender gap” in workplace
authority (i.e., the gender gap net of the distribution of attributes of men andwomen
in the sample). Our interest in these equations is strictly with theBn coefficients, not
with the controls per se. As in equation (1), the glass ceiling hypothesis implies that
these coefficients will become more negative as n increases.
Supplementary Models
In addition to the equations predicting odds ratios for being in level n + 1 compared
to level n,we will estimate two other models with slightly different dependent
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 283
TABLE 3: Control Variables Used in the Analysis
Variable Definition
State Dummy variable distinguishing public- and private-sector employees
(1 = public)
Occupation Three dummy variables: upper white collar, lower white collar, upper
manual; omitted category is lower manual
Part-time Dummy variable, 1 = works less than 30 hours per week, 0 = works 30 or
more hours per week
Education Years of schooling
Age Age in years
Age squared Age in years squared
Children Dummy variable, 1 = children present in the home, 0 = no children living at
home
Marital status Dummy variable, 1 = married, 0 = not married
Gender Dummy variable, 1 = women, 0 = men
variables. These are listed in Table 4. In the grouped-level model, adjacent levels in
the hierarchy are collapsed into broader categories to increase the sample size for
the test of the changes in the gender gap coefficients. In the overall-level model, we
construct five dummy variables, each of which contrasts people at or below a given
level of the hierarchy with people above that level. The gender coefficient in this
model indicates the odds of women compared to men being above or below a given
cut point in the hierarchy.
There are three reasons why we estimate these additional models. First, because
of limitations in sample size, for many of the regressions in the adjacent category
model, there are simply too few cases to have high confidence in the values of the
coefficients in the equations. By grouping categories together in the supplementary
models, we increase the sample size on which the coefficients are estimated. Second,
the supplementary models relax somewhat the assumption that the six hierarchical
levels in our measure of workplace authority are neatly ordered and comparable
across all work settings. Level 2 in some organizations may really be the
equivalent of level 3 in others. By grouping the categories together in different
ways, we may be able to smooth out some of the messiness in using these categories
across many different kinds of organizations. Third, we know in advance that the
data do not rigorously conform to the demanding assumptions needed to use the
basic model as a rigorous test of the glass ceiling hypothesis. If the basic pattern of
284 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
TABLE 4: Alternative Dependent Variables
1. Adjacent-level model (basic model)
A0 0 versus 1 = nonmanager versus supervisor
A1 1 versus 2 = supervisor versus lower manager
A2 2 versus 3 = lower manager versus middle manager
A3 3 versus 4 = middle manager versus upper manager
A4 4 versus 5 = upper manager versus top manager
This model directly contrasts adjacent levels.
2. Grouped-level model
G0 0 versus 1 = nonmanager versus supervisor
G1 1 versus 2, 3 = supervisor versus lower and middle manager
G2 1, 2 versus 3, 4 = supervisors + lower manager versus middle and upper manager
G3 2, 3 versus 4, 5 = lower and middle manager versus upper and top manager
3. Overall-level model
L0 0 versus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 = nonmanager versus all positions in managerial hierarchy
L1 1 versus 2, 3, 4, 5 = supervisor versus lower manager and above
L2 1, 2 versus 3, 4, 5 = lower manager and below versus middle manager and above
L3 1, 2, 3 versus 4, 5 = middle manager and below versus upper manager and above
L4 1, 2, 3, 4 versus 5 = upper manager and below versus top manager
This model compares people at or below a given level of the hierarchy with people
above that level.
NOTE: Categories on either side of the “versus” have been combined to form a single category in the
dichotomous contrast. Thus, in model 3, for variable L2, 1, 2 versus 3, 4, 5 indicates that levels 1 and 2 are
combined and levels 3 to 5 are combined.
results is quite consistent across these alternative specifications of the dependent
variable, this may add some confidence to our interpretations.
RESULTS
Table 5 presents the results for the basic model (the adjacent-level model) for the
gross gender gap in authority (i.e., the gender gap not controlling for any attributes
of respondents) at different levels of the authority hierarchy. In all three countries,
there is a statistically significant gender gap in authority between level 0 and level 1.
That is, in each country, the odds of a woman being a bottom-level supervisor (level 1)
instead of a nonmanagement employee (level 0) are significantly less than those of
men.
While the results in Table 5 thus confirm the presence of a significant gender gap
in authority, they provide no support for the specific predictions of the glass ceiling
hypothesis for the United States. The glass ceiling hypothesis implies that the gender
coefficients in equation (1) should be significantly more negative at the higher
levels of the hierarchy than at lower levels. In the United States, for the gross gender
gaps in authority, none of the coefficients for contrasts above the bottom of the hierarchy
approaches statistical significance, and none is even nominally more negative
than the coefficient for the bottom-level contrast. These coefficients are more
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 285
TABLE 5: Gross Gender Gap inAuthority at Different Levels of theAuthority Hierarchy
in the United States, Australia, and Sweden (adjacent category model)
United States Australia Sweden
Levels Being
Compared Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n
A0: 0 versus 1 –.56*** 2,078 –.30*** 1,867 –.71*** 1,682
(.11) (.11) (.13)
A1: 1 versus 2 .20 540 .28 568 .01 387
(.26) (.22) (.31)
A2: 2 versus 3 .02 254 –.76*** 258 –1.06** 128
(.29) (.26) (.43)
A3: 3 versus 4 –.28 271 .09 248 –.20 111
(.29) (.28) (.56)
A4: 4 versus 5 .31 212 –.19 159 .49 79
(.31) (.35) (.59)
NOTE: Significant contrasts across levels being compared: United States: A0 versus A1 is significant;
Australia: A1 versus A2 is significant, and A2 versus A3 is significant; Sweden: A0 versus A1 is borderline
significant. The Bn coefficients are from the logistic regression: Log [Pr(n + 1)/Pr(n)] = an + BnFemale,
where Pr(n) is the probability of being in level n of the hierarchy, Pr(n + 1) is the probability of being in
level n + 1, and the subscript n indicates that the coefficients in the equation are for the contrast between
level n and n + 1.
**p < .01, one-tailed test. ***p < .005, one-tailed test.
consistent with the viewthat oncewomen overcome the obstacles to getting into the
authority structure, their promotion possibilities do not significantly differ from
those of men than they are with the view that there exists a glass ceiling to upward
movement.
In Sweden and Australia, the results are not quite so clear-cut. In both countries,
the coefficient measuring the gender gap in authority in the comparison of levels 2
and 3 (row A2 in Table 5) of the managerial hierarchy—lower-level managers and
middle managers—is significant and negative: –.76 in Australia and –1.06 in Sweden.
This means that among managers at levels 2 or 3 in the hierarchy, the odds of a
woman being at level 3 are 46 percent those of a man in Australia and 34 percent
those of a man in Sweden. These coefficients also indicate a nominally larger gap in
authority at this middle level of the hierarchy than at other levels: The coefficients
for contrast A2 are considerably more negative than those for contrast A1 (the gender
gap between supervisors and lower managers) and for contrasts A3 (between
middle and upper managers) and A4 (upper managers and top managers) and modestly,
although not statistically significantly, more negative than the coefficient for
contrast A0.10 This pattern is consistent with the claim that there is a glass ceiling
effect at the middle level of managerial hierarchies in these two countries.
Table 6 presents the results for the adjacent category models controlling for the
range of attributes in Table 3. These results enable us to see if any of the gender gaps
in Table 5 can be attributed to the distributions of these attributes across men and
286 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
TABLE 6: Net Gender Gap in Authority at Different Levels of the Authority Hierarchy in
the United States,Australia,and Sweden (adjacent category model, controlling
for individual attributes)
United States Australia Sweden
Levels Being
Compared Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n
A0: 0 versus 1 –.35** 1,867 –.25* 1,809 –.81*** 1,510
(.14) (.13) (.16)
A1: 1 versus 2 .30 482 .06 558 .33 349
(.31) (.25) (.37)
A2: 2 versus 3 –.35 234 –.57* 254 –.95* 113
(.34) (.31) (.53)
A3: 3 versus 4 –.47 248 .14 243 –.27 99
(.36) (.33) (.72)
A4: 4 versus 5 .37 187 –.18 154 .59 75
(.44) (.41) (.74)
NOTE: Significant contrasts across levels being compared: Sweden: A0 versus A1 is significant. The Bn
coefficients are from the logistic regression: Log [Pr(n + 1)/Pr(n)] = an + BnFemale + ΣiBniXni, where
Pr(n) is the probability of being in level n of the hierarchy, Pr(n + 1) is the probability of being in level n +
1, the Xni are the various compositional controls listed in Table 2, and the subscript n indicates that the
coefficients in the equation are for the contrast between level n and n + 1.
*p < .05, one-tailed test. **p < .01, one-tailed test. ***p < .005, one-tailed test.
women. While there are some changes in the coefficients, the basic patterns are
quite similar to those in Table 5. For the United States, the only difference of note is
that the coefficient for the gender gap in contrast A3 (middle and upper managers)
becomes nominally more negative than in contrast A0, although the A3 coefficient
remains statistically insignificant. For Sweden and Australia, the coefficients for
the gender gap in authority in contrastA2 were slightly reduced (i.e., the coefficient
became somewhat less negative), but they are still statistically significant, and they
remain the most negative coefficients in these two countries.11
Table 7 presents the results for the two supplementary models. Again, the results
are very much in line with those discussed in Tables 5 and 6. In none of the regressions
is there any trace of glass ceiling effects in the United States, whereas in Sweden
and Australia, around the middle levels of the authority structure, women
appear to face somewhat greater obstacles than at the bottom.
CONCLUSION
The data in this project do not allow for a definitive test of the glass ceiling
hypothesis for several reasons. First, the strategy of assessing relative promotional
probabilities from cross-sectional distributions is problematic unless unrealistic
demographic assumptions are met.We argued that since the biases of this method
are likely to inflate the appearance of glass ceiling effects, if it turns out that no glass
ceiling effects appear in the cross-sectional data, they would still be relevant for
provisionally assessing the glass ceiling hypothesis. Nevertheless, since there are
many possible distortions introduced by using cross-sectional data, and not all of
them may work in the same direction, a fine-grained test of the glass ceiling
hypothesis should rely on data that directly measure promotional trajectories for
men and women. What is needed is a comprehensive set of career histories of a
large sample of men and women with detailed descriptions of the organizations
within which they have worked and their hierarchical location within those organizations.
Second, if glass ceiling effects are highly concentrated at the very apex of
organizations, then relying on sample survey data of the sort used in this article will
simply miss the phenomenon. At most, survey research would be able to identify
glass ceiling effects in the middle to upper tiers of organizations. Third, even given
the limitations of the kind of data used in this article, the relatively small sample size
has made it difficult to conduct rigorous statistical tests of the differences in odds
ratios across levels of the hierarchy.We have had to rely mainly on descriptions of
the patterns of coefficients. For all of these reasons, the results of the analysis in this
article are at best suggestive.
What they do suggest are three basic conclusions. First, in line with previous
research on gender and authority, in all three countries a gender gap in authority
exists even when a range of personal attributes is included in the equation. None of
the results concerning the presence or absence of strong glass ceiling effects should
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 287
TABLE 7: GenderGapinAuthority at Different Levels of theAuthority Hierarchy in the United States,Australia,and Sweden (supplementary models)
United States Australia Sweden
Without Controls With Controls Without Controls With Controls Without Controls With Controls
Levels Being Compared Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n Bn (SE) n
Grouped category model
G0: 0 versus 1 –.56*** 2,078 –.35** 1,867 –.30*** 1,867 –.25* 1,809 –.71*** 1,682 –.81*** 1,510
(.11) (.14) (.11) (.13) (.31) (.16)
G1: 1 versus 2, 3 .23 711 .09 639 –.20 717 –.31 704 –.55* 459 –.21 411
(.17) (.21) (.16) (.19) (.24) (.29)
G2: 1, 2 versus 3, 4 .11 811 –.24 730 –.56*** 816 –.49** 801 –1.17*** 498 –.95*** 448
(.16) (.20) (.16) (.19) (.28) (.33)
G3: 2, 3 versus 4, 5 –.11 466 –.29 421 –.30 417 –.11 408 –.42 207 –.44 188
(.20) (.25) (.21) (.25) (.37) (.47)
Overall-level model
L0: 0 versus 1-5 –.47*** 2,544 –.39*** 2,288 –.45*** 2,284 –.38*** 2,217 –.97*** 1,889 –.93*** 1,698
(.09) (.11) (.09) (.11) (.11) (.14)
L1: 1 versus 2-5 .18 923 –.00 826 –.34** 876 –.35* 858 –.73*** 538 –.41* 486
(.14) (.18) (.14) (.17) (.20) (.25)
L2: 1-2 versus 3-5 .15 923 –.15 826 –.59*** 876 –.50*** 858 –1.06*** 538 –.85*** 486
(.14) (.18) (.15) (.18) (.24) (.29)
L3: 1-3 versus 4, 5 .04 923 –.26 826 –.45** 876 –.30 858 –.90*** 538 –.82* 486
(.17) (.21) (.19) (.22) (.31) (.38)
L4: 1-4 versus 5 .21 923 .07 826 –.53 876 –.35 858 –.59 538 –.43 486
(.21) (.26) (.34) (.34) (.39) (.49)
NOTE: TheBn coefficients are from the logistic regressions: Log [Pr(n + 1)/Pr(n)] = an+BnFemale and Log [Pr(n + 1)/Pr(n)] = an+BnFemale + ΣiBniXni, where Pr(n) is the probability
of being in level n of the hierarchy, Pr(n + 1) is the probability of being in level n + 1, the Xni are the various compositional controls listed in Table 2, and the subscript n
indicates that the coefficients in the equation are for the contrast between level n and n + 1.
*p < .05, one-tailed test. **p < .01, one-tailed test. ***p < .005, one-tailed test.
288
therefore be taken as indicating the absence of gender discrimination in authority
structures.
Second, in the United States at least, there is little evidence for large and systematic
glass ceiling effects. This conclusion is consistent with the findings of Yamagata
et al. (1997).12 On the basis of the data analyzed here, the disadvantages
women face in acquiring authority are, if anything, greatest at the lower levels of the
managerial hierarchy, not the upper levels. If this result is confirmed in research
using other methods, it has significant implications for struggles against gender discrimination
in workplaces. In the United States, at least, removing gender-related
obstacles to getting into the authority hierarchywould appear to be a more pressing
task than removing obstacles to promotions in the upper reaches of authority
structures.
Third, there do appear to be possible glass ceiling effects in Sweden and Australia
but located more around the middle of managerial hierarchies than at the top: In
these countries, women appear to be particularly disadvantaged relative to men in
moving from lower- to middle-management levels. These enhanced obstacles seem
to be especially strong in the Swedish case. Of course, because the biases in our
strategy of analysis may tend to exaggerate glass ceiling effects, the appearance of
these heightened obstacles in Sweden and Australia may simply be artifacts of our
measurement techniques. Nevertheless, given the contrast with the results for the
United States, they do suggest that such obstacles are probably stronger in these
cases.
Nothing in the data analysis of this article provides an explanation for these
cross-national differences. In previous research, Wright and Baxter (1995) hypothesized
that the generally greater gender gap in authority in Sweden than in the
United States was, at least in part, a reflection of a critical difference between
women’s struggles against gender inequality in the liberal democratic and social
democratic political traditions. In liberal democratic politics, the pivotal focus of
struggle is equal rights, and this leads to policies designed to eliminate various
forms of discrimination that affect individual opportunities in the market. In social
democratic politics, the core issue is satisfaction of needs, which in a capitalist market
economy leads to policies directed at the decommodified provision of services
(e.g., child care, elder care, public health, etc.) and political regulation of labor market
transactions (e.g., legally mandated, generous parental leave policies, active
labor market policies). The result is that much less political energy has been
devoted to ending gendered discrimination in employment practices in Sweden,
which may help explain both a larger overall gender gap in authority and the presence
of glass ceiling effects within hierarchies. Australia, in these terms, is somewhat
of a mixed case.With a stronger labor movement than the United States and a
labor party with a more social democratic cast, the women’s movement has been
less preoccupied with equal rights, but its overall political culture is still more in the
liberal democratic than social democratic tradition.
Even though the results of this article must be taken as very tentative, the basic
message here is nevertheless clear: Claims about the existence of a glass ceiling are
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 289
quite vulnerable to observational misperceptions. The very low representation of
women at the top of authority hierarchies may create an appearance of a glass ceiling—
a concentrated structure of impediments to promotion at the higher levels of
organization—where in fact discrimination is either more or less constant throughout
the organization or even concentrated at the bottom. Since the rhetoric of a glass
ceiling may deflect political attention away from struggles over opportunities at the
lower levels of hierarchies (which in any case will affect the lives of a greater
number of people), the metaphor should be used with caution.
APPENDIX
Methodological Issues in Studying the Glass Ceiling Hypothesis
Anumber of issues make it problematic to empirically examine the glass ceiling hypothesis
with cross-sectional survey data of the sort we use in this article.
1. Nonstandardization of hierarchies. Few organizations have an internal hierarchical
structure as simple as the military with unambiguously ranked levels and clear, consistent
channels of promotion. Furthermore, the number of levels varies enormously across work
organizations, both because organizations vary in size but also because they vary in organizational
design. While there may be a sense in which one can treat the apex of organizations and
perhaps the bottom hierarchical level of line supervisors as roughly comparable across
organizations, it is much less clear that the diverse assortment of levels between these poles
has the same hierarchical meaning across organizations of different sizes and shapes. “Middle
managers” in a small shop and a multinational corporation are not really in similar hierarchical
positions.
2. Movement into and out of levels. A number of complexities in the movement of people
in hierarchies make studying gender-specific promotion probabilities difficult. First,
recruitment into levels is not simply by promotion from the next lower level within an organization
or even by recruitment of people from outside the organization who were in the
equivalent next lower level in some other organization. There are many lateral moves within
and across organizations as well as recruitment of people into middle and even upper-level
positions who did not previously occupy any hierarchical position. The advancement
process within managerial hierarchies is thus much less ordered than the movement through
levels of an educational system. With rare exceptions in an educational transition process,
everyone who enters high school has completed primary education; everyone who enters
college graduated from high school; everyone who graduates from college had previously
had “some college” (i.e., they did not simply acquire a college degree without intermediate
study after high school); everyone who enters graduate school graduated from college; very
few people with Ph.D.s go back to school to get a second B.A. degree; and so on. Second,
movement can be downward as well as upward. Especially in the context of movement
across organizations—for example, movement from the upper levels of a small firm to the
middle levels of a large corporation—this is probably not a rare event. Third, people may voluntarily
exit organizations and leave the hierarchy before reaching the highest level they
could have attained if they had stayed in their jobs. If women voluntarily leave in this way at
higher rates then men, then the distribution of men and women across levels may simulate a
glass ceiling where none exists.
290 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
3. Historical legacies. At any point in time, the actual distribution of men and women
across hierarchical levels either within a specific organization or in the society at large will
depend not simply on the currently existing allocation rules, whatever those might be, but on
the legacies of past allocation rules and past gender-specific labor force participation rates.
There is every reason to believe that gender-related promotion practices have undergone at
least some recent historical change, and of course, there have been massive increases in
women’s labor force participation. Distributional patterns that may look like a glass ceiling
could thus simply be by-products of past discrimination and past lower levels of women’s
labor force participation rather than current practices. Discrimination could in principle have
been completely eliminated in organizations, or at least differential discrimination across
levels could have been eliminated, and yet therewould still be high concentrations ofwomen
in lower levels of the hierarchy. There simply has not been enough historical time to allow
these new cohorts of women to be promoted up to the highest levels they will eventually
achieve.
4. Unmeasured differences in employee quality. Even if it were the case that we could
solve all of the structural complexities of promotions, the fact that men andwomen at a given
level of an authority hierarchy may have different unmeasured qualities may confound any
inferences drawn directly from differential promotion rates. These quality differences could
work either to make it seem that a glass ceiling is present when one does not really exist or to
mask the presence of a glass ceiling. If, for example, it were the case that men on average
have certain qualities that are important for managerial promotions but that are not captured
by easily observable measures of individual attributes (e.g., willingness to sacrifice intimate
personal relations for careers), and if these attributes become increasingly important as one
moves up a hierarchy, then increasing promotion advantages for men relative to women
might simply reflect the increasing salience of this personal attribute rather than intensified
gender discrimination per se. Women with these attributes might have the same promotion
probabilities as men; it is simply less likely that women will actually have these attributes.
Gender differences in unmeasured personal attributes, however, could also mask a glass ceiling.
Suppose the promotion rate advantage of men relative towomen is constant across levels
of the hierarchy. In such a situation, it might be expected that women are being selected for
promotion on more exacting criteria than men. In effect, women face a more intense competitive
selection process than men since it is harder for them to be promoted. In such a context,
the average quality of women managers compared to men managers might be expected
to increase more rapidly as one moves up the hierarchy. If relative promotion probabilities of
men are constant in this situation, this might nevertheless still be consistent with the relative
obstacles faced by women steadily increasing: It would become progressively harder for a
woman with given personal qualities to get promoted relative to a man with those same
qualities.
Given these complications, the ideal data for estimating gender-specific promotion probabilities
across levels of hierarchies would be complete work histories (which include
detailed specifications of the hierarchical location of all jobs and the hierarchical structure of
work organizations)—with detailed inventories of job-relevant personal attributes for a sufficiently
large sample of adults, including people who have exited from the labor force—that
would make it possible to study cohort-specific probabilities of movement across each level
of a hierarchy at various points in the past.With such data, the probability ofwomen in a specific
cohort moving from a given level in authority structures to a higher level at different
points in the course of their prior career could be compared to the probabilities of men in the
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 291
same cohort, controlling for the appropriate range of personal attributes and organizational
characteristics. Doing this for all cohorts and all levels of the hierarchywould then make possible
a reasonable test of the glass ceiling hypothesis.
Such data, as far aswe know, do not exist. An alternativewould be to examine time-series
data based on employment records for all of the employees of a single organization (see, e.g.,
Yamagata et al. 1997). Such data would make it possible to estimate gender-specific promotion
probabilities across levels of the organization over time. Several problems, however,
would confront the use of such data for testing the glass ceiling hypothesis. First, at most, the
analysiswould evaluate the glass ceiling hypothesis in the specific organization under study,
not in society at large. Second, if there is significant recruitment into positions above the lowest
levels from outside of the organization, it would be impossible to estimate the probabilities
of women compared to men being recruited since there would be no way of estimating
the denominator for the probabilities (i.e., the size of the pool of people from which recruitment
took place). Third, unless one tracked the subsequent careers of everyone who left the
organization, there would be no way of knowing whether people who exited from a given
level accepted jobs at a higher level in some other employing organization.
NOTES
1.Yamagata et al. (1997, 571) use the term glass ceiling in away congruent with the usage proposed
here: “While, as a metaphor, the glass ceiling conveys a strong connotation . . . when the glass ceiling is
actually measured by the mobility of individuals between different hierarchical levels, one recognizes
that it has different levels of severity, or closedness, and thus the analyst can investigate the phenomenon
as a matter of degree rather than as a dichotomy.” While they do not explicitly define the glass ceiling as
intensifying relative disadvantages for women in promotions, they recognize that glass ceilings can
come in varying degrees of severity, which is consistent with our formulation.
2. Some readers may object to this somewhat looser use of the expression “glass ceiling,” feeling
that the term should be restricted to extreme cases in which there is absolute, blocked mobility for
women confronting an impermeable barrier. If one adopts such a strict usage of the expression, then
whenever a corporationwould promote a singlewoman beyond the alleged “ceiling,” onewould have to
say that the ceiling had disappeared for it would no longer be the case that women “cannot advance to
higher levels.” Few people who use the expression “glass ceiling,” however, would abandon the term in
the face of token/minimal promotions of this sort. It is for this reason that we believe the sociological
content of the glass ceiling metaphor should be understood as vertical intensification of discrimination.
In any event, readers who object to this looser use of the “glass ceiling” expression should note that if
there exists a glass ceiling in the literal sense of completely blocked mobility, it will satisfy any test of the
looser definition. If, therefore, the evidence is against the presence of a loosely defined glass ceiling, this
would also imply the absence of a literally defined ceiling.
3. This hypothetical example roughly corresponds to some available organization-level data. In
data from a court case, Marshall et al. v. Alpha Beta, concerning gender distributions at different levels
of a managerial hierarchy in a grocery chain (reported in Reskin and Padavic 1994, 89), 49.9 percent of
grocery department clerks were female, 16.8 percent of assistant grocery department managers were
female, 7.6 percent of grocery department managers were female, and 3.1 percent of store managers
were female. The relative chances of a man compared to a woman being an assistant manager instead of
a clerk were roughly 5:1, whereas the relative chances of a man compared to a woman being a department
manager instead of an assistant manager were only 2.4:1, and the relative chances of a man
292 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2000
compared to awomen being a store manager instead of a department manager were 2.5:1. Whilewomen
face significant barriers to promotions at all levels of this organization, these barriers appear, if anything,
to be stronger at the bottom than at the top.
4.We tested for time-by-gender interactions in a range of models in addition to the ones used in this
article. In particular, we tested whether such interactions existed when we aggregated various measures
of authority into a more general authority variable. In none of these models were the time-by-gender
interactions statistically significant in any of the three countries.
5. Since the proportion of the sample in authority positions does vary across the two samples within
each country, we include time as an additive term in the equations.
6. These odds ratioswould directly reflect the ratios of promotion probabilities forwomen and men
at each level of the hierarchy—the key issue for directly testing the glass ceiling hypothesis—if four
unrealistic assumptions were met: (1) The structure of positions is strictly ordered—everyone at level n
+ 1 was recruited from level n (either within the same organization or from some other organization).
There are no demotions and no skipped levels. (2) The relative promotion probabilities of men and
women have not changed over time. (3) The distribution of positions has not changed over time. (4) The
relative rates of exit (retiring) from every level of the managerial hierarchy for men and for women have
not changed significantly over time and do not vary with level of the hierarchy. If these conditions were
met, then the systemwould be in a demographic equilibrium, and the static distributions across levels for
men andwomenwould faithfully reflect the gender-specific promotion probabilities. The comparison of
the odds ratios in equation (1) at different levels of the hierarchy would then be a direct test of the glass
ceiling hypothesis. As we explain in the methodological appendix, these assumptions are not plausible,
but since the most pervasive biases are likely to exaggerate the appearance of a glass ceiling, negative
findings would still have analytical credibility.
7. It is straightforward to test the statistical significance of differences in the Bn coefficients for
nonoverlapping pairs of categories (e.g., the coefficient B0 for levels 0 and 1 compared to the coefficient
B2 for levels 2 and 3) by testing the significance of an interaction term of gender by comparison in an
equation for the sample of people in all four levels. To test the significance level of coefficient differences
for overlapping pairs of categories (e.g., the coefficient B0 for levels 0 and 1 compared to the coefficientB1
for levels 1 and 2), we use multinominal logistic regressions that enable us to test equality constraints
among the coefficients of the model.
8. While the fact thatwomen are concentrated in part-timework might itself be the result of various
practices of gender inequality, this would suggest a very different process from the glass ceiling.
9. The list of control variables in Table 3 is fairly limited since it contains only those variables that
were available in both surveys in all three countries. A number of relevant control variables—such as
total labor force experience, job tenure with current employer, and firm size—were missing from one or
more of these surveys. When we added these additional control variables in the analyses of those surveys
for which they were available, they did not make any substantive difference in the basic patterns of
coefficients.
10. Using multinominal logistic regressions to test the significance of these differences in coefficients,
we found that in Australia, coefficient A2 is significantly more negative than coefficient A1 and
A3 but not coefficient A0. In Sweden, coefficient A2 does not differ significantly from any of the other
coefficients. The formal statistical tests of significance of differences in the gender gap coefficients,
therefore, do not indicate a significant glass ceiling effect.
11. None of the relevant contrasts across coefficients is statistically significant using multinomial
logistic regression tests in Table 6.
12. Yamagata et al. (1997) found that from 1977 to 1989, for federal employees in a selected set of
professional, technical, and managerial occupations, the probabilities of women in federal employment
reaching the highest grade level were roughly the same as those of a man if one included career trajectories
that crossed occupational boundaries as well as those contained within occupational boundaries.
Baxter, Wright / GLASS CEILING HYPOTHESIS 293
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Janeen Baxter is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her
research interests are gender inequality in paid and unpaid work, families, households, and the
life course. She is coeditor of Class Analysis and Contemporary Australia (1991) and author of
Work at Home: The Domestic Division of Labour (1993) as well as numerous research articles.
Erik Olin Wright is the Vilas Professor of Sociology at the University ofWisconsin–Madison. His
work has mainly concerned the development of the Marxist tradition in sociology, with particular
focus on the analysis of class. His most recent book, Class Counts (1997), contains extensive
analyses of the interactions of class and gender.
294 GENDER & SOCIETY / posted by - jayjyotisamanta in public interest

JAYJYOTISAMANTA , JAS: I AM BOKARO BASED BENGALI BOY. I AM IN JHARKHAND A...

JAYJYOTISAMANTA , JAS: I AM BOKARO BASED BENGALI BOY. I AM IN JHARKHAND A...: "I AM BOKARO BASED BENGALI BOY. I AM IN JHARKHAND ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICE. PRESENTLY I AM POSTED AS BDO - CUM - CO - DY. COLLECTOR IN, GOVT, O..."Max Weber on Bureaucracy

I. Merriam Webster’s Definition of Bureaucracy:
1 a : a body of nonelective government officials b : an administrative policy-making group2 : government characterized by specialization of functions, adherence to fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority3 : a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation


II. Background and Description
Max Weber was born 1864 and died 1920. Weber asks how is it a leader can give a command and have actions carried out? He answers the question by classifying claims to the "legitimacy" in the exercise of authority.

His observations on bureaucracy were heavily influenced by his experiences in the United States. While traveling there, Weber was struck by the role of bureaucracy in a democratic society. The problem, as he saw it, was that modern democracy required bureaucratic structures of all kinds in the administration of government and even in the conduct of professional party politics. Handing over the reins to a class of unelected "experts," however, threatened to undermine the very basis of democracy itself. In particular, Weber stressed two problems: the unaccountability of unelected civil servants and the bureaucratic tendency toward inflexibility in the application of rules.
Weber's interest in the nature of power and authority, as well as his pervasive preoccupation with modern trends of rationalization, led him to concern himself with the operation of modern large-scale enterprises in the political, administrative, and economic realm. Bureaucratic coordination of activities, he argued, is the distinctive mark of the modern era. Bureaucracies are organized according to rational principles. Offices are ranked in a hierarchical order and their operations are characterized by impersonal rules. Incumbents are governed by methodical allocation of areas of jurisdiction and delimited spheres of duty. Appointments are made according to specialized qualifications rather than ascriptive criteria. This bureaucratic coordination of the actions of large numbers of people has become the dominant structural feature of modern forms of organization. Only through this organizational device has large- scale planning, both for the modern state and the modern economy, become possible. Only through it could heads of state mobilize and centralize resources of political power, which in feudal times, for example, had been dispersed in a variety of centers. Only with its aid could economic resources be mobilized, which lay fallow in pre-modern times. Bureaucratic organization is to Weber the privileged instrumentality that has shaped the modern polity, the modern economy, the modern technology. Bureaucratic types of organization are technically superior to all other forms of administration, much as machine production is superior to handicraft methods.
Yet Weber also noted the dysfunctions of bureaucracy. Its major advantage, the calculability of results, also makes it unwieldy and even stultifying in dealing with individual cases. Thus modern rationalized and bureaucratized systems of law have become incapable of dealing with individual particularities, to which earlier types of justice were well suited. The "modern judge," Weber stated in writing on the legal system of Continental Europe, " is a vending machine into which the pleadings are inserted together with the fee and which then disgorges the judgment together with the reasons mechanically derived from the Code."
Weber's focus on the trend of rationalization led him to concern himself with the operation and expansion of large-scale enterprises in both the public and private sectors of modern societies Bureaucracy can be considered to be a particular case of rationalization, or rationalization applied to human organization. Bureaucratic coordination of human action, Weber believed, is the distinctive mark of modern social structures. In order to study these organizations, both historically and in contemporary society, Weber developed the characteristics of an ideal-type bureaucracy:
Hierarchy of authority
Impersonality
Written rules of conduct
Promotion based on achievement
Specialized division of labor
Efficiency
According to Weber, bureaucracies are goal-oriented organizations designed according to rational principles in order to efficiently attain their goals. Offices are ranked in a hierarchical order, with information flowing up the chain of command, directives flowing down. Operations of the organizations are characterized by impersonal rules that explicitly state duties, responsibilities, standardized procedures and conduct of office holders. Offices are highly specialized. Appointments to these offices are made according to specialized qualifications rather than ascribed criteria. All of these ideal characteristics have one goal, to promote the efficient attainment of the organization's goals
Some have seriously misinterpreted Weber and have claimed that he liked bureaucracy, that he believed that bureaucracy was an "ideal" organization. Others have pronounced Weber "wrong" because bureaucracies do not live up to his list of "ideals." Others have even claimed that Weber "invented" bureaucratic organization. But Weber described bureaucracy as an "ideal type" in order to more accurately describe their growth in power and scope in the modern world.
The bureaucratic coordination of the action of large numbers of people has become the dominant structural feature of modern societies. It is only through this organizational device that large-scale planning and coordination, both for the modern state and the modern economy, become possible. The consequences of the growth in the power and scope of these organizations is vital to understanding our world.
III. Quotes from Weber on Bureaucracy:
"From a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks
"The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of superiority and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones. No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover, so cheaply... Rational calculation . . . reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog. . . . The passion for bureaucratization drives us to despair"
"The needs of mass administration make it today completely indispensable. The choice is only between bureaucracy and dilettantism in the field of administration"
"When those subject to bureaucratic control seek to escape the influence of existing bureaucratic apparatus, this is normally possible only by creating an organization of their own which is equally subject to the process of bureaucratization"
[Socialism] "would mean a tremendous increase in the importance of professional bureaucrats"
"It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones--a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative systems, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ...is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics. . . we were to deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life."
"When fully developed, bureaucracy stands . . . under the principle of sine ira ac studio (without scorn and bias). Its specific nature which is welcomed by capitalism develops the more perfectly the more bureaucracy is 'dehumanized,' the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is the specific nature of bureaucracy and it is appraised as its special virtue"
"The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other kind of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of organization"
"Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs--these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic organization"
"The apparatus (bureaucracy), with its peculiar impersonal character. . . is easily made to work for anybody who knows how to gain control over it. A rationally ordered system of officials continues to function smoothly after the enemy has occupied the area: he merely needs to change the top officials"
Imagine the consequences of that comprehensive bureaucratization and rationalization which already today we see approaching. Already now . . . in all economic enterprises run on modern lines, rational calculation is manifest at every stage. By it, the performance of each individual worker is mathematically measured, each man becomes a little cog in the machine and, aware of this, his one preoccupation is whether he can become a bigger cog. . . . It is apparent today we are proceeding towards an evolution which resembles [the ancient kingdom of Egypt] in every detail, except that it is built on other foundations, on technically more perfect, more rationalized, and therefore much more mechanized foundations. The problem which besets us now in not: how can this evolution be changed?--for that is impossible, but: what will come of it?

IV. Quotes from Others on Bureaucracy:
“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work”
-Albert Einstein

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
-Franz Kafka quotes (German Writer of visionary fiction, 1883-1924)

“Join in the new game that's sweeping the country. It's called "Bureaucracy" Everybody stands in a circle. The first person to do anything loses.” -anonymous

“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
- Thomas Sowell quotes (American Writer and Economist, b.1930)

“More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.”
- Dennis Prager quotes (Radio talk show host, author, lecturer)
“A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.” -- Bagehot, Walter
“Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.” -O'Rourke, P. J. (American Political Satirist)
V. Responses:
1. Explore the functions and dysfunctions of bureaucracy?
2. Why are the rules so important in a bureaucracy? What are the advantages and disadvantages of making decisions on the basis of general rules, rather than on a case-by-case basis? What are the implications of this in the political process?
3. Is a heavy bureaucracy an necessary structure to help governments to deal with the complexities of modern life and the expectations of modern governments? Explain?
4. Does bureaucracy, by definition, lead to stagnancy, corruption and/or mediocrity?
5. In what ways might bureaucracy be non-democratic?

JAYJYOTISAMANTA , JAS: JAYJYOTISAMANTA , JAS: I AM BOKARO BASED BENGALI B...

JAYJYOTISAMANTA , JAS: JAYJYOTISAMANTA , JAS: I AM BOKARO BASED BENGALI B...: Max Weber on Bureaucracy

I. Merriam Webster’s Definition of Bureaucracy:
1 a : a body of nonelective government officials b : an administrative policy-making group2 : government characterized by specialization of functions, adherence to fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority3 : a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation


II. Background and Description
Max Weber was born 1864 and died 1920. Weber asks how is it a leader can give a command and have actions carried out? He answers the question by classifying claims to the "legitimacy" in the exercise of authority.

His observations on bureaucracy were heavily influenced by his experiences in the United States. While traveling there, Weber was struck by the role of bureaucracy in a democratic society. The problem, as he saw it, was that modern democracy required bureaucratic structures of all kinds in the administration of government and even in the conduct of professional party politics. Handing over the reins to a class of unelected "experts," however, threatened to undermine the very basis of democracy itself. In particular, Weber stressed two problems: the unaccountability of unelected civil servants and the bureaucratic tendency toward inflexibility in the application of rules.
Weber's interest in the nature of power and authority, as well as his pervasive preoccupation with modern trends of rationalization, led him to concern himself with the operation of modern large-scale enterprises in the political, administrative, and economic realm. Bureaucratic coordination of activities, he argued, is the distinctive mark of the modern era. Bureaucracies are organized according to rational principles. Offices are ranked in a hierarchical order and their operations are characterized by impersonal rules. Incumbents are governed by methodical allocation of areas of jurisdiction and delimited spheres of duty. Appointments are made according to specialized qualifications rather than ascriptive criteria. This bureaucratic coordination of the actions of large numbers of people has become the dominant structural feature of modern forms of organization. Only through this organizational device has large- scale planning, both for the modern state and the modern economy, become possible. Only through it could heads of state mobilize and centralize resources of political power, which in feudal times, for example, had been dispersed in a variety of centers. Only with its aid could economic resources be mobilized, which lay fallow in pre-modern times. Bureaucratic organization is to Weber the privileged instrumentality that has shaped the modern polity, the modern economy, the modern technology. Bureaucratic types of organization are technically superior to all other forms of administration, much as machine production is superior to handicraft methods.
Yet Weber also noted the dysfunctions of bureaucracy. Its major advantage, the calculability of results, also makes it unwieldy and even stultifying in dealing with individual cases. Thus modern rationalized and bureaucratized systems of law have become incapable of dealing with individual particularities, to which earlier types of justice were well suited. The "modern judge," Weber stated in writing on the legal system of Continental Europe, " is a vending machine into which the pleadings are inserted together with the fee and which then disgorges the judgment together with the reasons mechanically derived from the Code."
Weber's focus on the trend of rationalization led him to concern himself with the operation and expansion of large-scale enterprises in both the public and private sectors of modern societies Bureaucracy can be considered to be a particular case of rationalization, or rationalization applied to human organization. Bureaucratic coordination of human action, Weber believed, is the distinctive mark of modern social structures. In order to study these organizations, both historically and in contemporary society, Weber developed the characteristics of an ideal-type bureaucracy:
Hierarchy of authority
Impersonality
Written rules of conduct
Promotion based on achievement
Specialized division of labor
Efficiency
According to Weber, bureaucracies are goal-oriented organizations designed according to rational principles in order to efficiently attain their goals. Offices are ranked in a hierarchical order, with information flowing up the chain of command, directives flowing down. Operations of the organizations are characterized by impersonal rules that explicitly state duties, responsibilities, standardized procedures and conduct of office holders. Offices are highly specialized. Appointments to these offices are made according to specialized qualifications rather than ascribed criteria. All of these ideal characteristics have one goal, to promote the efficient attainment of the organization's goals
Some have seriously misinterpreted Weber and have claimed that he liked bureaucracy, that he believed that bureaucracy was an "ideal" organization. Others have pronounced Weber "wrong" because bureaucracies do not live up to his list of "ideals." Others have even claimed that Weber "invented" bureaucratic organization. But Weber described bureaucracy as an "ideal type" in order to more accurately describe their growth in power and scope in the modern world.
The bureaucratic coordination of the action of large numbers of people has become the dominant structural feature of modern societies. It is only through this organizational device that large-scale planning and coordination, both for the modern state and the modern economy, become possible. The consequences of the growth in the power and scope of these organizations is vital to understanding our world.
III. Quotes from Weber on Bureaucracy:
"From a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks
"The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of superiority and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones. No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover, so cheaply... Rational calculation . . . reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog. . . . The passion for bureaucratization drives us to despair"
"The needs of mass administration make it today completely indispensable. The choice is only between bureaucracy and dilettantism in the field of administration"
"When those subject to bureaucratic control seek to escape the influence of existing bureaucratic apparatus, this is normally possible only by creating an organization of their own which is equally subject to the process of bureaucratization"
[Socialism] "would mean a tremendous increase in the importance of professional bureaucrats"
"It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones--a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative systems, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ...is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics. . . we were to deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life."
"When fully developed, bureaucracy stands . . . under the principle of sine ira ac studio (without scorn and bias). Its specific nature which is welcomed by capitalism develops the more perfectly the more bureaucracy is 'dehumanized,' the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is the specific nature of bureaucracy and it is appraised as its special virtue"
"The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other kind of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of organization"
"Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs--these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic organization"
"The apparatus (bureaucracy), with its peculiar impersonal character. . . is easily made to work for anybody who knows how to gain control over it. A rationally ordered system of officials continues to function smoothly after the enemy has occupied the area: he merely needs to change the top officials"
Imagine the consequences of that comprehensive bureaucratization and rationalization which already today we see approaching. Already now . . . in all economic enterprises run on modern lines, rational calculation is manifest at every stage. By it, the performance of each individual worker is mathematically measured, each man becomes a little cog in the machine and, aware of this, his one preoccupation is whether he can become a bigger cog. . . . It is apparent today we are proceeding towards an evolution which resembles [the ancient kingdom of Egypt] in every detail, except that it is built on other foundations, on technically more perfect, more rationalized, and therefore much more mechanized foundations. The problem which besets us now in not: how can this evolution be changed?--for that is impossible, but: what will come of it?

IV. Quotes from Others on Bureaucracy:
“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work”
-Albert Einstein

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
-Franz Kafka quotes (German Writer of visionary fiction, 1883-1924)

“Join in the new game that's sweeping the country. It's called "Bureaucracy" Everybody stands in a circle. The first person to do anything loses.” -anonymous

“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
- Thomas Sowell quotes (American Writer and Economist, b.1930)

“More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.”
- Dennis Prager quotes (Radio talk show host, author, lecturer)
“A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.” -- Bagehot, Walter
“Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.” -O'Rourke, P. J. (American Political Satirist)
V. Responses:
1. Explore the functions and dysfunctions of bureaucracy?
2. Why are the rules so important in a bureaucracy? What are the advantages and disadvantages of making decisions on the basis of general rules, rather than on a case-by-case basis? What are the implications of this in the political process?
3. Is a heavy bureaucracy an necessary structure to help governments to deal with the complexities of modern life and the expectations of modern governments? Explain?
4. Does bureaucracy, by definition, lead to stagnancy, corruption and/or mediocrity?
5. In what ways might bureaucracy be non-democratic?

JAYJYOTISAMANTA , JAS: I AM BOKARO BASED BENGALI BOY. I AM IN JHARKHAND A...

CrPC (Amendment) Act 2008 gets Presidents accent
President gives accent to Law forbidding arrest in offenses carrying upto seven years imprisonment
It has been reported in the Times of India dated 19th January, 2009 that the President has granted assent to the law past nearly three week back by the parliament which brings about major changes in the Criminal Procedure Code. This newly enacted law take away the powers of the police to arrest in cases of alleged offenses which carry a maximum sentence upto seven years of imprisonment.
Once the law, CrPC (Amendment) Act 2008, becomes effective, the police, instead of arresting the accused, will be obliged to issue him/her a “notice of appearance” for any offence punishable with imprisonment up to seven years. The person can be arrested only if he/she does not appear before the police in response to the notice.
Seven years or less is the maximum penalty for a lot of offences. These offences include such as attempt to commit culpable homicide, kidnapping, death by negligence, cheating, voluntarily causing grievous hurt, outraging a woman’s modesty, robbery, attempt to suicide.
These amendments have been made in section 41 of the CrPC. Under Section 41, as it originally stood, a police officer may, without an order of a magistrate and without a warrant, arrest any person who has been concerned in any cognisabale offense. The rationale of the amendment in section 41 of the code of criminal procedure has been justified by the home minister of India Shri P. Chidambaram reportedly in his letter which says that the provision was being capable of being misused and was in fact actually being misused in practice. He substantiated this claim of misuse of the arrest law by the police using it more of an engine of harassment rather than an instrumentality of fair investigation by citing the various reports of the law commission of India, the Malimath committee of reforms, and the landmark supreme court judgment in the case of DK Basu. In fact it was misused of this law that had necessitated the delivering of DK Basu judgment in which various dos’ and donts’ were prescribed to be strictly complied by the police force while investigating a case and arresting an accused.
The amendment in CrPC, however, allows police to arrest without an order from a magistrate and without a warrant a person who commits a cognisable offense “in the presence of a police officer”.
It also enables arrest of “a person who has committed a cognisable offence (punishable for a term which may be less than 7 years or extend upto 7 years) if there is a reasonable complaint or credible information or a reasonable suspicion and the police officer is satisfied that such arrest is necessary for proper investigation of the offence or for preventing tampering with the evidence“. The only additional requirement in such cases is that the police officer will have “to record his reasons” for making the arrest.
Some of the salient features of amendments to Section 41 of the CrPC, pertaining to power of arrests with police are,
1. The amendment proposes that the police officer may, instead of arresting the person concerned, issue a notice of appearance, asking him to cooperate with the police officer in the probe.2. Where such a notice is issued to any person, it shall be the duty of that person to comply with the terms of the notice and arrest can be made only if the person fails to comply with the notice.3. Every police officer while making an arrest shall “bear an accurate visible and clear identification of his name.” At the time of arrest, the memorandum shall be attested by at least one witness, who is a member of the family of the person arrested or a respectable member of the locality where the arrest is made.