Forty years ago this week, Marilyn Loden coined the term ‘glass ceiling’ and changed how we think of women in the workplace forever. Stylist speaks

to every female professional’s heroine

W O R D S : A N N A F I E L D I N G

ack in the spring of 1978, a group of female executives gathered at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York to take part in a conference about women in the workplace. One

particular panel held on the 24 May was called Mirror, Mirror On The Wall and the subject was how women’s poor self-image stopped them from being promoted. None of them knew at the time that their panel would be the one everyone remembered long, long after the conference had ended.

The talks had been set up by the now defunct American feminist group The Women’s Action Alliance, of which Gloria Steinem was a founder member. Other sessions that delegates could attend included Hire Him! He’s Got Great Legs! and Becky Wants to Be A Plumber. In the Mirror, Mirror room, Marilyn Loden, 31, a mid-level executive at the New York Telephone Company, was realising that she disagreed with everyone she was sharing the stage with. Loden was slated to speak last and she knew from her own research that it wasn’t a lack of confidence holding women back. It wasn’t not playing team sports. It wasn’t what her fellow panellists were saying. “What I was listening to was a long diatribe,” she says “covering all the things that women were doing to get in their own way.

“There was a lot of it about at the time, a lot of books for women with ambition and career aspirations. And it was all a fiction. The real problem was not in the woman herself, but in the culture and the mindset of most organisations… all the old stereotypes and biases. So that’s what I spoke about. There were certainly things

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was completed, many women from the audience came over to say ‘that has been my experience, what you describe has happened to me’.”

The phrase has now been in circulation for 40 years. Nearly every woman working today will know it. It’s used in the titles of books and articles. In her 2016 campaign for the United States presidency, Hillary Clinton spoke about “shattering the highest, hardest glass ceiling”. She had planned, if she won, to accept the title

spending more time at home. “Historically, it wasn’t unusual for me to be travelling three weeks out of four,” she says.

Her work on diversity started in the early Seventies when she was at the New York Telephone Company. The organisation’s parent company, American telecoms giant AT&T, asked her to look into why women weren’t progressing through the corporation. After “many, many months” of interviews and looking at performance reviews, she realised “that it was gender bias, nothing about the skills or abilities of women. It was an unconscious but very strong bias that said ‘women don’t belong in leadership roles’.”

Loden has battled this belief ever since, stating that we need to change the culture of work and leadership and not place the burden on individual women. “It is not,” she emphasises,

But these days it’s generally and rightly attributed to Loden. “A lot of people have claimed credit over the years,” she says. “In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Having named the problem, I’m glad to see other people acknowledge it and try to do something about it. I was

happy to see it resonated with a lot of women. I’m just not happy to know that it’s still as strong as it is.”

A graduate of Syracuse University in New York, Loden went on to write several books and run her own consultancy firm with clients including the US Treasury Department, The Federal Reserve Bank and Nasa. Now 72, she still works as a consultant on diversity matters (“I’ve spent my career trying to help organisations fix themselves and remove obstacles”). She lives in the Napa Valley in California with her husband and she still travels for work extensively, although she’s planning on

“about teaching women to lean in. We tend to look at leadership styles and not at the results

leaders produce. Women can be very effective leaders when they’re encouraged to use their own skills. Men can be loud and boisterous and even arrogant and get away with it. We tell women they should lean in, but when they start to state their opinions in the way that, historically, men have done, they’re viewed as bitches.”

Forty years after coining glass ceiling, Loden believes we all still have work to do on creating a more inclusive culture for women and

minorities. One of her own more recent successes was convincing the US Military to allow women to serve in the submarine service in 2010. This was a landmark in itself (“The military is such a large and complicated institution that it can feel like getting an elephant to turn around!”), but there was deeper thinking behind it. “My research showed that men who were in the submarine service, as opposed to the above water or in the aviation

part of the navy, were more likely to become admirals. There was a higher probability of reaching the top of the organisation if you

had that in your background and that route had been closed to women.”

“I think I’ve had some impact,” she says. “I am happy with what I’ve done. One of the reasons I’m still working is because I feel I’m continuing to make a difference. It’s been my life’s work. It’s not always easy, it’s not always happy circumstances, but I feel it’s very important. I’m an advocate for gender equality, I always have been. Sometimes people say, ‘Well, you’re getting older’, as in ‘what difference will it make to you now?’ But it makes a huge difference to me. I still want it to be better for the women coming up behind me.”

in New York’s Javits Centre, a building made almost entirely of glass. Loden’s ‘on the spot’ idea had real staying power.

Sometimes the phrase is attributed to magazine editor Gay Bryant, who used it in a 1984 interview with trade magazine Adweek

(“I don’t believe I invented it,” Bryant told The New York Daily News in 2016. “But I can say with truth I popularised the term”). The Wall Street Journal gave it an even wider push in 1986.

holding women back, but it wasn’t what they could see in the mirror on the wall, it was what they couldn’t see above them.”

It was the glass ceiling. The phrase came to Loden “on the spot” as

she listened to the discussion. It turned out to be the perfect metaphor: a neat way of describing something that was very easy to recognise as soon as it was named. The glass ceiling summed up the experience of being able to see the top jobs, but being prevented from reaching them. “I liked the idea of staying with something glass but not necessarily the mirror,” she says. “Something that was a barrier. After the panel

G L A S S C E I L I N G

LAUNCHING HER BOOK FEMININE

LEADERSHIP OR HOW TO

SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT

BEING ONE OF THE BOYS IN 1985

“The thing holding women in business back wasn’t what they could see in the mirror, it was what they

couldn’t see above them”

LODEN WAS 31 WHEN SHE

COINED THE PHRASE IN 1978

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