A glass ceiling is a metaphor usually applied to people of marginalized genders, used to represent an invisible barrier that prevents an oppressed demographic from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy. The metaphor was first used by feminists in reference to barriers in the careers of high-achieving women. It was coined by Marilyn Loden during a speech in 1978.
The United Nations Global Compact is a non-binding United Nations pact to get businesses and firms worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies, and to report on their implementation. The UN Global Compact is the world's largest corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiative, with more than 20,000 corporate participants and other stakeholders in over 167 countries. The organization consists of a global agency, and local "networks" or agencies for each participating country. Under the Global Compact, companies are brought together with UN agencies, labour groups and civil society.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is an American sociologist who is a professor of business at Harvard Business School. She co-founded the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative and served as Director and Founding Chair from 2008 to 2018. She was the top-ranking woman—No. 11 overall—in a 2002 study of Top Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. She was named one of the "50 most powerful women in Boston" by Boston Magazine and named one of "125 women who changed our world" over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping magazine in May 2010.
Güler Sabancı is a Turkish businesswoman, a third-generation female member of the Sabancı family, and the chairperson of the family-controlled Sabancı Holding, the second-largest industrial and financial conglomerate in Turkey. As of 2023, she was listed as the 77th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes, which first recognized her in 1999.
Catherine Bertini is an American public servant. She is the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. She was the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program from 1992 to 2002. She served as the UN Under-Secretary for Management from 2003 to 2005. Currently she is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Chair of the Executive Board of the Crop Trust.
The Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business is based at London Business School and was established as a joint partnership between London Business School and Lehman Brothers, the investment bank.
The phrase women in business refers to female businesspeople who hold positions, particularly leadership in the fields of commerce, business, and entrepreneurship. It advocates for their increased participation in business.
Queen bee syndrome refers to a social phenomenon where women in positions of authority or power treat subordinate females worse than males, purely based on gender. It was first defined by three researchers: Graham Staines, Carol Tavris, and Toby E. Jayaratne in 1973.
Catalyst Inc. is a global nonprofit founded by feminist writer and advocate Felice Schwartz in 1962. Schwartz also served as Catalyst's president for 31 years.
Lynda Gratton a British organizational theorist, consultant, and Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and the founder of HSM Advisory, known for her work on organisational behaviour.
Women in positions of power are women who hold an occupation that gives them great authority, influence, and/or responsibility in government or in businesses. Historically, power has been distributed among the sexes disparately. Power and powerful positions have most often been associated with men as opposed to women. As gender equality increases, women hold more and more powerful positions in different sectors of human endeavors.
Gender diversity is equitable representation of people of different genders. It most commonly refers to an equitable ratio of men and women, but also includes people of non-binary genders. Gender diversity on corporate boards has been widely discussed, and many ongoing initiatives study and promote gender diversity in fields traditionally dominated by men, including computing, engineering, medicine, and science. It is argued that some proposed explanations are without merit and are in fact dangerous, while others do play a part in a complex interaction of factors. It is suggested that the very nature of science may contribute to the removal of women from the 'pipeline'.
Second-generation gender bias refers to practices that may appear neutral or non-sexist, in that they apply to everyone, but which discriminate against women because they reflect the values of the men who created or developed the setting, usually a workplace. It is contrasted with first-generation bias, which is deliberate, usually involving intentional exclusion.
Herminia Ibarra is a scholar in the fields of organizational behaviour, leadership, and career development. She is the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School.
Ellen Ernst Kossek is an American academic and social scientist who is known for research on work, family, and personal life. She is the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor at Purdue University’s Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business. She previously served as the Research Director of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence for Purdue University’s Provost’s Office and as a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University’s School of Human Resources and Labor Relations. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Mount Holyoke College, her Master of Business Administration from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and her Ph.D from Yale University. She has work experience in international and strategic human resource management working in Asia, Europe and the U.S. for Hitachi, IBM & GTE. Dr. Kossek works globally to advance knowledge on gender and diversity, employment practices to support work and family, and the development of leader and positive workplace cultures to support well-being and productivity. Her research has been featured in national and international media such as the Financial Times, National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine, Time magazine, Marketplace, and the Washington Post.
Stellah Wairimu Bosire, is a Kenyan physician, corporate executive, human rights activist and author, a former co-executive director of Uhai Eashri and previously served as the chief executive officer of Kenya Medical Association and as the vice-chair of the HIV and AIDS Tribunal of Kenya.
Shaista E. Khilji is an American academic, researcher, and author. She is a Professor of Human and Organizational Learning & International Affairs at the George Washington University, where from 2018 to 2022 she served as a Faculty Senator, and a member of Faculty Senate Executive Committee. She is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of South Asia Journal of Business Studies.
Saniye Gülser Corat is the Founder and GEO of NoBiasAI?, a global think launched in 2022 with dual objectives: to reflect on a possible paradigm shift in AI from data-driven machine learning (ML) to knowledge-based machine reasoning (MR) and to develop gender audit tools to address gender bias in ML algorithms and datasets.
Modupe Nyikoale Akinola is an American organizational scholar and social psychologist who examines the science of stress, creativity, and how to maximize human potential in diverse organizations. She is currently the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, where she is the Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics.
Ronit Kark is a full professor of leadership and organizational psychology in the Department of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and the founder and former director of the 'Gender in the Field' Graduate Program at the Gender Studies department of Bar-Ilan. She is a distinguished research professor at the University of Exeter Business School and an affiliate scholar at the Center For Gender in Organizations (CGO) at Simmons University, Boston.
