The Glass Ceiling: Dumb Limits on Creativity as Well as on Careers : Economy: Breaking the barriers to advancement for women and minorities can change the management style, and the agenda, of executives.

It’s official. The Glass Ceiling exists.

This is not news to a lot of people who have lumps from bumping against it, but now the Bush Administration has certified that women and minorities have trouble moving up in corporate America. Labor Secretary Lynn Martin recently announced the results of a government study showing that the roadblocks faced by women and members of minority groups are pervasive, not figments of some feminist imagination.

Now even a conservative Administration has certified that the glass ceiling is as real as steel. What does this mean? If we smash the glass, it will create fairer treatment for some women, blacks and Latinos--which they deserve. But is more at stake? In fact, there’s good evidence that letting new kinds of folks into the corridors of power will change the shape of the whole structure--and predictions that not doing so could harm the nation’s competitive edge.

Women, in particular, bring new styles of management to the business world -- at least when you get enough of them in an organization for what’s been called a “critical mass.” The first women--the tokens--often illustrate the Maggie Thatcher syndrome. They learn to play hardball harder than the boys and to succeed in a hierarchical structure that runs on male rules. But the second wave of women tries to rewrite the rules. The result can be a management style that is more personal, more democratic and more flexible--a style that may be most successful in the corporation of the future.

That’s the conclusion of a study conducted by Judy B. Rosener of UC Irvine and sponsored by the International Women’s Forum. The study matched 400 men and women executives in comparable jobs; Rosener found that successful women tend to motivate their followers by sharing information and power--in contrast to their male counterparts, who relied more on the traditional organizational structure, with its rewards and punishments. The women execs practiced what Rosener calls “interactive leadership”--encouraging people who worked for them to participate in decisions and encouraging the development of self-esteem in others.

The old rules may be out of date in the new global village anyway. The Japanese have succeeded by encouraging power sharing and decision-making by workers--what might be called a “feminine” style. The old “command and control” method may not be flexible enough to work anymore. Women execs, in fact, may be the pioneers of the new non-hierarchical workplace. As organizations need to be more flexible, the chain of command will be less important than personal power--the ability to persuade, rather than coerce, people to share your goals and objectives.

Madeleine Kunin, the former governor of Vermont, believes that female leaders do indeed challenge the conventional wisdom. “What is at first considered to be weak, such as including others in the decision-making process, may in fact, as we develop our own model, be strong. What is considered strong in leadership style--intimidation, keeping a distance from critics, talking instead of listening--may in fact be weak.”

The glass ceiling may be “keeping the men’s hut pure,” as Carol Goldberg, president of Boston’s AVCAR Group, puts it, but it may also be keeping fresh ideas and new talent out of the American corporate hierarchy. Goldberg, who is working on a book on women in management as a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College at Harvard, notes that corporations are being influenced by women, but rarely do men admit it. “The boys love learning from us as long as we aren’t too assertive,” she says.

Goldberg points out that one only has to look around to see that the United States is becoming a multicultural society. To succeed in a competitive world market, U.S. corporations will have to tap into the nation’s diversity.

If women managers succeed with a more flexible, participatory style, male managers will find it easier to break out of the old command-and-control mode, which many men find confining as well. But if only white males are allowed at the top, corporations will be frozen in old styles by the sheer weight of “we’ve always done it that way!” When women’s ways of managing are locked out of the tower, change is barred as well.

If women in high-level jobs can change how institutions behave, they also change the agenda. In journalism, as women moved into top editorships, stories about rape, child abuse and family issues moved into the news columns that once featured only stories about war, crime and politics. In the arena of public policy, women’s voices are challenging policies geared exclusively toward male concerns.

For example, following the adage that people fund what they fear, the American health establisment based most of its research on men. The cholesterol study, the smoking study, the aspirin-and-heart-disease study--were all done on men. Breast cancer, which kills 40,000 women a year, gets only $17 million in basic research. And two major studies found that women routinely get less aggressive medical care for heart disease. Dr. Bernadine Healy, head of the National Institutes of Health, says the studies prove that there is sex bias in treatment of heart disease.

This sorry situation would have rolled on unchecked if the women’s congressional caucus hadn’t pushed for studies that revealed the bias, and if the NIH didn’t have its first woman director. Under Healy’s direction, the agency will undertake a 10-year, $500-million women’s health project. And a group of women legislators has introduced a package of women’s health-equity bills to remedy what Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) called “a disgraceful pattern of neglect.”

The example of women getting top jobs in government assuredly helps open doors for women in private-sector management as well. “If a woman can be governor of Texas, it’s hard to argue that a woman can’t manage a corporate division,” says Ann Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee.

Women who get those top jobs--in government or in business--she says, are less insulated from the vagaries of everyday life than men. They’ve often had to do the shopping, diaper the babies, take the clothes to the cleaners. As a result, they are more tuned in than fast-track men to real-life issues. Lewis points out that for these women, the problems average people face--juggling work and family--are not the topic for a speech, but part of their everyday life. Child care is more than the subject of a memo to the staff. In fact, a study by the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University showed that women legislators--across the political spectrum--were more concerned than their male counterparts about issues involving women and children, and less inclined to approve the use of force for settling disputes.

Women’s influence in politics has already changed the political climate, Lewis says. Ten years ago, if it was even whispered that a man was too concerned about the impact of his job on his family, he was derided as a wimp. Today, many of the men who are considering a run for the presidency talk openly about the degree to which their decision depends on their sense of family obligation. Just this past week, Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) decided against a White House bid saying: “My family--my wife and four young children--are more important than politics and personal ambition.”

The glass ceiling, it seems, is more than a ceiling. It is a bell jar, which, clamped on American institutions, can kill not only the dreams of many talented individuals for advancement, but can suffocate new ideas, perceptions and ways of thinking that this nation so desperately needs. If corporations close the doors at the top to so many Americans, it may be slamming shut, as well, the dreams of American success in a changing world.