A Glass Ceiling Thick as Lead : New study shows women and minorities barred from rising very high up corporate ladder

Shattering the “glass ceiling” in corporate America should be even more of a national priority now that a significant study by the Bush Administration has shown that women and minorities face barriers in their careers at a far earlier stage than previously believed.

The Labor Department study revealed that women and minorities are blocked by subtle corporate practices at much lower management levels than heretofore suspected. And the careers of minorities were found to plateau much earlier than those of white women, according to Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin.

The yearlong pilot study of nine Fortune 500 corporations was the government’s first effort to analyze corporate prejudices that exclude women and minorities from jobs traditionally known to be paths to managerial and executive positions. The study found that women and minorities were most frequently excluded from informal career-enhancement activities such as networking, mentoring and participation in policy-making committees. They also were more likely to be dealt jobs in public relations than, say, in production--a traditional fast track to promotion.

To many, the Labor Department’s conclusions merely confirm the painfully obvious. But the findings are philosophically at odds with the Administration’s stiff opposition to proposed civil rights legislation. President Bush erroneously maintains that the bill, which would offer substantial protections against job discrimination for minorities and women, would somehow require quotas for hiring or promotions.

Although planning no new enforcement campaign, the Labor Department says it will stress educational and voluntary efforts by business to break the promotional barriers that contribute to the glass-ceiling syndrome. The barriers include not-so-visible facets of corporate culture, such as word-of-mouth recruitment practices and the tendency of managers, who are mostly white men, to mentor individuals like themselves. The department wants to mount a public awareness campaign to encourage companies to improve their methods of hiring and promotion. It also plans an award program to spotlight firms that make effective efforts to encourage equal opportunity. It wants business to do the right thing, rather than face the possibility of being coerced into corrective action. Nothing wrong at all with corporate activism--if it works.