BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING

FORTY YEARS ago this week the phrase “glass ceiling” was coined to describe the limitations that women encounter at work. Marilyn Loden had listened patiently as an all-female conference panel explained that it was their own poor self-image that held them back at work, in a session entitled “Mirror, mirror on the wall.”

Eventually it was her time to speak. She suggested that, rather than a looking-glass holding them back, women should think in terms of a glass ceiling, the external factors blocking their progress. “Everyone was aghast,” she recalled this week, speaking from her home in California. “They’d all reached the consensus that women were their own worst enemies.” She says things have changed since 1978. “But we still see a real imbalance within leadership positions.”

Surely there were few communities which displayed the glass ceiling effect as clearly as our own? Our communal leadership is generally middle-aged, middle class men, often with many women working for them, but few in the top jobs. Women were for decades barred from sitting on shul boards. Sure, some women did make it to positions of power, but they really stood out.

Take Ita Symons, veteran chief executive of the Agudas Israel Housing association, who built her career within the male dominated world of the Strictly Orthodox community. She describes her early years of trying to get affordable housing for the Strictly Orthodox Jewish community as “like hitting my head against a brick wall rather than a glass ceiling.

“It is no exaggeration to say that I was the laughing stock of women and men as well as the authorities and people that I approached for help.” Nonetheless she persevered, and created affordable housing for many.

But now things are changing. In the last few weeks we’ve seen Rabba Dina Brawer become the UK’s first Orthodox woman rabbi and