Jessica Bennett* says a new generation of female political candidates has found new metaphors to describe the familiar challenges they face.
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Kamala Harris is prepared to “break things.”
Elizabeth Warren said she would “persist.”
Amy Klobuchar has challenged voters to discount women “at your own peril,” while Tulsi Gabbard insisted that a US Presidential race with six women is not an anomaly but “what an election should look like.”
The women running for US President are promising many things as they make their pitches to voters.
They are being asked repeatedly how being women may affect their chances.
But so far, none of them is emphasising the “glass ceiling”, although the symbol remains intact.
In politics, the phrase became associated with the aspirations of Hillary Clinton, who spoke at key moments of success and defeat about cracking the glass ceiling.
But in this barrier-breaking field of female candidates, it is noticeably absent.
“Words have their moments, especially colloquialisms,” said the linguist Robin Lakoff, Professor Emerita at the University of California.
“Often, after a word or phrase gets a lot of use, people simply stop using it — because we like to sound original and this one seems tired.”
Which is not to say it is entirely verboten — or that metaphorical ceilings are not actually being shattered.
Kirsten Gillibrand tweeted the term this month as part of a pledge for gender parity in national security, while Marianne Williamson notes on her campaign website that the “proverbial glass ceiling” is one of the things holding women back.
Aside from the record-breaking number of female candidates for US President, a recent study published in American Psychologist found that a majority of people believe women are just as competent as men — if not more.
“It’s a pretty dramatic shift,” said Alice Eagly, a social psychologist at Northwestern University.
Etymology of a term
As a term, the “glass ceiling” dates to around 1978, when it was discussed by female workers at Hewlett-Packard and used onstage at a panel discussion about women’s aspirations.
Each used it to describe the inability of white-collar women to rise beyond the mid-manager level in their jobs, and the often invisible barriers preventing that rise.
The phrase gained traction in the mid-1980s.
The New York Times ran an article in 1986 about the glass ceiling for female politicians, quoting Betty Friedan, co-founder of the US National Organisation for Women.
“Our women tried to go higher and I wonder whether they ran into a glass ceiling,” Ms Friedan said then, recalling unsuccessful political campaigns by women that year.
“In corporations, women get to a middle level and then there’s a glass ceiling — not overt discrimination, just a feeling that you can go this high and no higher.”
In the years following, the term continued to go mainstream — a kind of linguistic shorthand for a problem that could be difficult to pinpoint or describe.
By the 1990s it had been used to describe the experiences of women across industries.
More recently, it has been uttered by the likes of Priyanka Chopra, the actor Brie Larson and Madeleine Albright, who wore a glass-ceiling brooch to the Democratic National Convention in 2016.
The ‘highest, hardest glass ceiling’
Still, nobody has used the allegory quite like Mrs Clinton, who has for years talked about the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” she was determined to crack.
She spoke of it movingly in her 2008 concession speech, saying that while she was not able to shatter it, the ceiling now had “about 18 million cracks.”
Eight years later, when she became the first female nominee of a major party’s ticket, she leaned into the metaphor even harder.
When she spoke by video to the Democratic National Convention, a virtual glass ceiling broke onscreen; she accepted the nomination later in the week while saying, “When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”
When Mrs Clinton gave her concession speech, Google Search results for “glass ceiling” peaked, higher even than their previous peak during the Democratic National Convention that summer.
She noted sombrely that while “we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling,” someone would, eventually.
‘An outdated standard’
With six women in the 2020 US Presidential race, perhaps the phrase seems “almost a little bit embarrassing, or maybe just irrelevant,” said Ms Lakoff, the linguist, adding that “of course it’s not.”
Which is not to say that the candidates are thinking about gender any less.
“There’s a worry that if you draw too much attention to these biases, to your womanhood, that it reinforces people’s doubts about it,” said Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist at the Wharton School of Business, pointing to research from the corporate world that illustrated that point.
“So, if I were a female candidate in this cycle … I would be afraid that talking about the glass ceiling would only reinforce it.”
And, anyway, there are other terms to play around with these days — such as “glass cliff,” to describe the phenomenon of women and minorities being tasked with leadership during periods of crisis, which was recently added to Dictionary.com.
(The “cliff” part is the idea that they’re being set up to fail.)
Or “motherhood penalty” to describe bias specifically against working mothers and “likeability trap” to refer to the challenge female leaders face by having to prove they are tough and likeable at once.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old Congresswoman from New York, has opted for “shake the table” and “build our own house” to describe breaking barriers.
This time around, Ms Klobuchar noted that the term itself isn’t just about winning the White House — it’s about running in the first place.
The number of women in the race is “a testament to the progress we have made,” she said.
“There are still barriers, but the highest and hardest glass ceiling has so many cracks in it, it is well on its way to becoming an outdated standard.”
Sharon Attia contributed research.
* Jessica Bennett is the Gender Editor of The New York Times. She tweets at @jessicabennett. Her website is jessicabennett.com.
This article first appeared at www.nytimes.com.
