Truth Is the Tool That Will Smash the Glass Ceiling

Perception: White men are increasingly under attack in this country, losing out on jobs and promotions to less qualified white women, and to minorities of both genders, because American employers are deeply committed to affirmative action, which is inherently unfair. Sure, maybe at one time, things were different, but the playing field is finally level. Women and minorities, who get special treatment at the expense of white men, should quit their bellyachin’ already.

Reality: According to a bipartisan federal commission, after three decades of affirmative action, the executive suites of America look almost exactly the way they looked in 1965. White men, who make up only 43% of the American work force, hog 95 of 100 top jobs. “Serious barriers to advancement remain,” says the Glass Ceiling Commission’s report, “such as persistent stereotyping, erroneous beliefs that ‘no qualified women or minorities are out there’ and plain old fear of change.”

So.

Are we having cognitive dissonance yet?

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Only four years ago, a Republican named Bob Dole praised the idea of a Glass Ceiling Commission. “For this senator,” he said, “the issue boils down to ensuring equal access and equal opportunity.”

A year later, he announced that the time had come to put the screws to corporate America for its failure to promote women and minorities into positions of power.

“We’re not trying to establish quotas,” Dole said. “We’re trying to persuade, particularly the corporate sector, that they’re missing good opportunities.”

The vehicle by which this persuasion would be accomplished was Dole’s own Glass Ceiling Commission, whose 21 members unleashed the shocking news two weeks ago that white guys still rule the corporate and industrial roost.

But, oh what a difference an angry white male electorate, a weakened Democratic President, a Republican congressional majority and a hankering for a presidential nomination make.

Dole has had a change of heart. (One can only imagine the pillow talk in the Dole boudoir, considering that his wife, former Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole, is so closely identified with the Glass Ceiling Initiative that a federal award for companies that excel in diversity efforts is named for her.)

Says the new, improved, politically expedient Dole: “After nearly 30 years of government-sanctioned quotas, timetables, set-asides and other racial preferences, the American people sense all too clearly that the race-counting game has gone too far.”

To which one female Glass Ceiling Commission member replies: “Look at the pie charts. White men have set-asides for themselves: 95% of the top jobs!”

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That affirmative action has produced benefits--especially for white women--is beyond question. In large numbers, white women have been able to rise as far as middle management, and now hold about 40% of those jobs. The picture is bleaker for African Americans, the very population whose problems affirmative action was created to redress. According to the federal report, black women hold about 5% of middle-management jobs, while black men hold 4%. Latinos are represented in even smaller numbers.

But the glass ceiling (a phrase coined by the Wall Street Journal in 1986) remains intact.

What keeps it whole are unfounded and seriously stupid stereotypes, a lack of mentoring, and fear--among other things. Latinos, the report says, are perceived as being not as highly motivated, although they have the highest work-force participation rate of all ethnic groups. Women are thought to miss work more often than men, but (excluding maternity leaves) they have a lower absentee rate than men.

I don’t want to make white men any more paranoid than they may already be, but when I asked Glass Ceiling Commission member Judith Lichtman, who is president of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, why misperceptions about affirmative action persist, her answer wholly jibed with a long-held suspicion of mine:

“In some measure, white men have been lied to by their supervisors and their managers, who have used affirmative action as an excuse. Telling someone you are not going to give them a promotion because they don’t deserve it and they are mediocre is a very unpleasant thing to do. . . . So employers won’t say, ‘You know, you really can’t cut the mustard.’ They say, ‘I am just so sorry. I had to give the job to a woman.’ ”

They just--unfortunately--don’t say it enough.

* Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.