Glass Ceiling? It’s More Like a Steel Cage : Bush panel finds little room at top for women or nonwhites

In the heated debate over affirmative action, some who want to abolish all such programs suggest that lots of white males are being unfairly shunted aside in favor of lots of African Americans, Latinos, Asians and white women. However, there simply are no facts to support this. Indeed, according to a bipartisan commission appointed by then-President George Bush, the senior ranks are still populated almost exclusively by white males.

The findings by the Glass Ceiling Commission, a panel of business executives and legislators, are important and especially timely. It is expected that an initiative calling for a blanket rejection of policies that allow race, ethnicity and gender to be taken into account in hiring, promotion and college admissions will make it onto the California state ballot.

In Washington, President Clinton, mindful of the evident exodus of angry white men from the Democratic Party, for starters has ordered an evaluation of federal affirmative-action programs. That’s defensible and could prove useful. But too many in Congress are rushing to jump on the anti-affirmative-action bandwagon, including Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. Ironically, long before Dole made his presidential ambitions public, he sponsored the very bill that created the federal panel to study the situation of minority men and all women in American industry. And it is that panel, in reporting its findings last week, that turned up so little evidence of progress.

The facts are simple. White male managers dominate the senior levels at the top 1,000 U.S. industrial firms. They also dominate the top 500 business firms. In the top echelon of U.S. commerce, no less than 97% of the positions at the level of vice president and above are held by whites, the panel found. Between 95% and 97% of these senior executives are male. They have a lock on most of the top jobs, while most minority men and women and most white women struggle to crash the glass ceiling.

The commission said that one cause of the paucity of promotions was the fear and prejudice of white men. Of course that is only part of the problem. More minorities and women must be given access early on to educational and social opportunities that lead to business success. But even education does not always level the playing field. Asian Americans are nearly twice as likely to hold college degrees as the general population, yet they remain much less likely to become executives and managers. Do racial stereotypes block their promotion?

Black men with professional degrees earn 79% of the pay of their white male counterparts. Black women with professional degrees earn even less; they earn, on average, only 60% of what white males do. Latinos, who are less likely to have the advanced degrees that foster advancement in companies, are “relatively invisible in corporate decision-making positions,” the report says. Their visibility should increase as their qualifications and numbers increase. Latinos are also hampered by pernicious stereotypes, including the misperception that most Latino workers are foreign-born, the panel maintains.

The Glass Ceiling Commission based its findings on hard information, not unsubstantiated fears. Facts, and nothing but, should inform the intense debate over affirmative action--and the decisions that will determine how this nation can fairly handle the moral obligation of opening the doors of opportunity to all who knock.