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. No matter how invisible the glass ceiling is expressed, it is actually an obstacle difficult to overcome. 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, labor groups and civil society.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter 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 one of the "125 women who changed our world" over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping magazine in May 2010.
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Department of History, and by courtesy the d-school, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. An international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender and intersectionality in science, technology, and medicine, she is the founding Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Schiebinger received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), from the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and from Universitat de València, Spain (2018). She was the first woman in the field of History to win the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 1999.
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 2020, she is listed as the 76th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes, which first recognized her in 1999.
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 women who hold positions, particularly leadership in the fields of commerce, business, and entrepreneurship. It advocates for their increased participation in business.
Queen bee syndrome is a phenomenon first defined by Carol Tavris and two collaborators in 1973. "Queen bee" is a derogatory term applied to women who have achieved success in traditionally male-dominated fields. These women often take on "masculine" traits and distance themselves from other women in the workplace in order to succeed. They may also view or treat subordinates more critically if they are female, and refuse to help other women rise up the ranks as a form of self-preservation.
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.
The concept of multicultural and diversity management encompasses acceptance and respect, recognition and valuing of individual differences. Diversity is defined as differences between people, that can include dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies. Multiculturalism refers to the existence of linguistically, culturally and ethnically diverse segments in an organisation.
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 or fair 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.
Monique Morrow is a Swiss-American business woman, technology engineer and entrepreneur. She is president and co-founder of the Humanized Internet, a nonprofit focused on providing individuals with a digital identity. She was previously Senior Distinguished Architect of Emerging Technologies at Syniverse, and CTO and Evangelist of New Frontiers Development and Engineering at Cisco Systems, Inc. She sits on a number of advisory boards and has 17 patents related to digitalization, networks, the Internet of Things, cybersecurity, and the safe handling of data.
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.
