The Glass Ceiling Has an Immune Response

Women currently make up about 58% of college students (earning 62.6% of all master’s degrees and 57% of all doctoral degrees) and make up 51% of the college-educated workforce. These stats seem to indicate that women are more motivated than ever to pursue a professional career. This is great, right? (I mean, unless you are a tradwife or a misogynist asshole.) Yay us! We finally achieved equality! High-fives all the way around! 🙌🏽 🥳🍾…

🙂

😬

😐

Right. I think we all know that’s not true, and if you recall my prowess in college statistics, I am awesome at using statistics to make things look wayyyy better or worse than they actually are. In this case the fact that there are now as many women in the professional workforce as men these days actually makes the inequities even more stark. Women still only earn about 82% of what men earn and they hold only 29% of C-suite positions. Put more succinctly, while women make up a (teeny tiny) majority of the workforce, they make up less than a third of executive leadership. All things being truly equal, half of executive leadership should be women, but that’s not the case; the numbers aren’t even horseshoe or hand grenade close.

The biggest hurdle for women is the first promotion to manager – the ‘broken rung’ (defined in 2019 by McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org) preventing women from climbing the corporate ladder – and it’s the very first rung in the ladder. In 2019, only 72 women were promoted to manager-level roles for every 100 men (41.8%). The gap has narrowed since then (93 women to every 100 men in 2025, or 48%). However, according to LinkedIn data the percentage of women hired into top-level management (executive and C-suite – 31.6% in 2019) hit a peak in 2022 at 34.8% and then started going back down each year since, dropping to 32.9% in 2025 (even with more women entering the workforce and more women making it past the broken rung each year).

The broken rung is an interesting name, but a more-apt name might be the ‘missing rung’ because every subsequent rung on the ladder is unstable, with the highest rungs being the most unstable. It’s a lot easier to accommodate a missing rung than it is to navigate an entire ladder of unstable rungs that may give way as soon as you step on them.

In technology, the gaps are even wider. Women represent as much as 48% of entry-level tech hires (almost half), but only 28% make it to management and only 11-21% make it to the C-suite.

 So, while women are consistently entering the college-educated workforce in larger numbers each year – even surpassing men in certain areas, the glass ceiling not only remains, but it’s actually getting harder to break. It’s almost as if the corporate machine thinks women are a disease that requires fortification at its highest levels to protect against female infiltration. This metaphor may sound hyperbolic, but I promise you it’s not.

This inequality isn’t an aptitude problem (though it is a perceived aptitude problem, which I’ll explain soon). It also isn’t a motivation problem. Careers are as important to women as they are to men. However, after decades of beating their heads against seemingly bulletproof glass, some women have decided it’s not worth the effort, meaning women are self-selecting out of promotions. So, it’s not just the obstacles that make it difficult for women to reach and break through the glass ceiling. Some women aren’t even attempting to try. In fact, some women don’t even want to get close enough to touch it.

But why? It’s not lack of ambition – women want to succeed as much as men. Women are just better at reading the room. When pursing a promotion they are unlikely to get (this isn’t defeatism; it’s fact-based reality) means having to do so with limited or no support (that men often get unsolicited) and extra emotional labor (that men never have to take on), many women determine that it’s just not worth it.

I was recently at a tech conference for women and I overheard a conversation with a woman who was a senior product manager at a large security software company. The discussion was about moving up to senior leadership and she said she didn’t want to move any higher citing the fact that she didn’t really think she’d fit in with leadership ‘culture’ at her company. After digging deeper, by ‘culture’ what she really meant was she wasn’t a man… or more specifically, she wasn’t a white man. Basically, she was peacing out ✌️✌️ before pursuing what she believed was an exercise in frustration and futility. Whether or not her belief was real didn’t matter. And let’s face it, it probably was. Even if she were able to navigate the obstacles to make it to the top, landmines still exist for women once they get there.

What nobody tells you is that breaking through the glass ceiling isn’t like bursting through the surface of a lake, taking a big gulp of fresh air, and finally being able to breathe easy while you yuk it up with all your fellow executive cronies from the top of Mount Bossyland. The ceiling doesn’t disappear once you’ve broken through it, and broken glass has sharp edges.

The Glass Ceiling Doesn’t Just Block Entry. It Has an Immune Response.

I love what I do, but I often miss the days where I was an IC where I was measured based on my quality of work without having to continuously justify my seat at the table. I suppose I was relatively lucky early in my career, especially since I work in a very male-dominated industry. For a brief period of time, I worked in cybersecurity for the automotive industry. Tech is already male dominated. Cybersecurity is more so. But automotive cybersecurity is the mack daddy of them all. Still, I’ve never felt uncomfortable in a room full of men, even when I was the only woman and I’ve always felt like I had a voice. That being said, since I went to a magnet school for STEM and a college that had a 10-1 male-female ratio I’ve been cultured most of my life to live in a male dominated world, so being the only woman has been a constant in my life and not an anomaly.

Until I made it to senior management, most of the issues I’ve had with gender discrimination have been just blips. I know I’ve been fairly paid and (mostly) fairly titled. I got to a point where I almost didn’t believe that sexism was a thing, or at least I thought that it was being overblown. In hindsight I’m not sure whether I had just been lucky or perhaps I had just lived with it for so long that I was blind to it. It was probably a little from column A and a little from column B.

It wasn’t until I started trying to climb the upper part of the ladder that I realized that my gender was a liability. On some level I had the irrational expectation that, while being a woman may make it harder for me to climb the ladder, once I made it to the top and broke through the glass ceiling, all of those issues would just automagically go away 🪄💨.

I was clearly delusional. Not only did they not go away; they got worse. I expected the challenges that naturally come from moving into executive leadership, but I didn’t expect to be constantly asked to justify my existence there.

Once you break through the ceiling, the system doesn’t immediately just welcome you with open arms. It’s not like making it through Hell Week and then suddenly becoming an official member of the elite, since only a specific subset of people needs to navigate Hell Week to get there. Instead, the system generates antibodies fueled by generations of institutionalized bias that continue to try and fight you off. The glass ceiling doesn’t disappear when you break through it. It leaves behind a hole with sharp edges that most women can never completely clear. When a woman finally makes it close the top, she is suddenly weighed down by two jobs – one is the one she was hired to do; the other is to constantly prove she deserves to be there.

The Immune Response Has a Favorite Weapon: The Double Bind.

The ‘double bind’ is a no-win, paradoxical situation where female leaders are criticized for exhibiting stereotypically ‘female’ behavior while also being criticized for not exhibiting stereotypically ‘female’ behavior. If you’re too personable or too supportive and collaborative (stereotypical female traits) you lack leadership capabilities. If you’re too direct or too confident and assertive (stereotypical male traits), you’re being too pushy making you threatening and difficult to work with.

At one of my previous companies, the double bind was doing extra effort throughout the organization. Women like me in executive leadership were ‘coached’ for not being accommodating enough. Specifically, I was told that I needed to be more receptive to the CEO’s ideas and that I shouldn’t just immediately say ‘no’ and shut him down. However, 1) I always entertained his ideas the first time, but by the 3^rd or 4^th time of rehashing the same thing, it was just more efficient to say, ‘no’ and move on; and 2) most of his ideas were bad (some were kind of meh while others were just WTF? horrific, but almost none were even close to good) so other than stroking his ego, there was no material benefit in coddling him like a toddler – ‘Oh, that’s a great idea! 🤩 You’re so smart! Gold star for you! 💫 But what if we just table that for now?’  (…orrrrr chuck it over into the abyss of bad ideas so we never have to revisit it again). On top of that, I always pushed back diplomatically and with data. But the net of it was that it had nothing to do with the way I pushed back. It was the fact that I pushed back at all.  

On the flip side of that, women who were just below executive leadership were denied promotions into executive leadership for being too nice, too agreeable, and (I shit you not) too positive - she was legit told that her positivity ‘damaged her executive credibility’.

Basically, women were told they were too female to lead, but not female enough once leading. It’s like Lucy always snatching the football away from Charlie Brown, but then the one time she lets him kick the ball, the goalposts disappear and reappear at the other end of the field.

The issue was never about how you behaved. It was about who you were (or perhaps who you weren’t). And you can change your behavior, but you can’t change who you are.

But the thing is that none of this was done maliciously, or even consciously. It’s not like that particular company was led by Dr. Evil and his mini-me sidekick. It’s a system created by years of institutionalized sexism (and racism; the double-bind can also be rooted in racism and it’s most insidious when it’s rooted in both racism AND sexism), where no version of ‘woman’ maps to ‘acceptable executive’ in the system’s psyche. The result is authority asymmetry: some leaders are allowed to be ‘in progress’; others must be ‘net positive’ at all times; some leaders are given full autonomy and trust; others are scrutinized and questioned about every decision they make. And the difference between how one leader is treated versus another is based on who they are and not how they behave, nor their proven level of competency. It’s a world where perceived competency in certain people trumps true competency in others. It’s very 1984.

The Catch-22: To Achieve More Equality in Leadership You Need More Equality in Leadership.

The glass ceiling immune response is actually an auto-immune response when you really think about it. It’s a system mis-identifying healthy and necessary things as foreign and bad and attacking them, ultimately hurting the entire system and not just the things it chose to attack. The glass ceiling immune response doesn’t just hurt women. It hurts the entire business.

DEI studies have shown that the biggest benefit of diversity isn’t about promoting equity or equality. It’s the fact that diverse opinions are better for business. Our society is diverse, so the world needs businesses and institutions who understand that diversity in order to serve everyone. And this isn’t just an altruistic notion. Business can make a lot more money if they address the needs and wants of everyone and not just those of white cishet men.

So, in order to ensure more equality/equity in business and business leadership, we need more equality/equity in business and business leadership. Seems easy enough, except for the fact that, even though we’ve made great strides in creating more equality (at least gender equality – other equality is a different discussion) in business, we’ve been less good at creating equity, and we’ve been pretty terrible at creating equity and equality at the leadership level, which is where both are the most important.

At this point, fighting a system that already thinks it’s being super equal and equitable (because the people who think that (today’s business leaders) are the opposite of diverse) to make it truly equal and equitable is a Sisyphean task.

What we really need is more female founders, and tech is a unique industry where this has the possibility of happening… but it’s not happening. As of 2025, about 15% of tech founders are women – the majority of those women are co-founding with men (about 33% of tech startups have mix-gendered founding teams whereas only about 3% have founding teams of all women).

What those numbers mean is 64% of tech startups have all male founders. In addition to that, startups with female founders are much more likely to be in EdTech or FemTech (relating to healthcare). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Actually, it’s quite good that women are finally feeling empowered enough to address the fact that health research has ignored women forfuckingever. But it’s also perpetuating the notion that certain things are more ‘female’ and that, even in tech, women should stay in their lane.

So my idea of getting more women to found their own tech companies sounds good in theory, right? But there is also something called the ‘funding gap’ because: of course there is. VCs are mainly led by men. So, are those tech startup numbers a result of fewer female tech entrepreneurs or VC gender bias? My guess is it’s a little of both, though I have no idea if it’s more one than the other. However, the same reasons preventing women from pursing promotions are the same reasons preventing women from becoming founders – the extra work required to overcome the years of inertia holding women back becomes too much very quickly.

Yet, I still have hope. Perhaps GenAI will become the great equalizer… eventually at least. Right now, VCs are still throwing money at a lot of dipshit ideas as long as “AI” is mentioned a few dozen times in the pitch deck… but once GenAI is deeply involved in the vetting process, the fact that ‘Chad sounded super compelling and confident’  whereas ‘Sasha seemed way too pushy and didn’t smile enough’ won’t matter. We’ll finally find out whether the bias was in the room or baked into the system. It’s probably both, but at least one is fixable. And I’m done waiting to find out which one.