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Empowering Women in Business - the Glass Ceiling

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Over the last 30-40, it has become accepted wisdom that enhancing the position of females is one of the most crucial levers of global development. When females are skilled and can earn their living and control their profits, many positive results follow: infant mortality rate reduces, child health and nutrition enhance, agricultural productivity increases, economies successfully evolve, and cycles of scarcity are broken (Coleman 13).
However, the challenges are still strikingly large. In the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, particularly, persistent gender gaps keep females from being really productive members of society (Coleman 13). Entrenched sex prejudice remains a leading feature of life for the majority of the world’s bottom two billion people, helping sustain the gulf between the most deprived and everyone else on the planet (Coleman 13). Narrowing that gulf requires the involvement of the international major organizations. Not simply does the global private sector have more money than some governments organizations, but it can use crucial leverage with its popular labels and by expanding promises of investment and employment. Some organizations already promote initiatives focused on women as part of their corporate programs (Coleman 13). But the really transformative shift - for global businesses and for females internationally – will happen when the organizations recognize that empowering women positively influences their bottom lines (Coleman 13).
The Glass Ceiling
The impassable obstacles between female employees and the executive suite were reported in the report issued by the Glass Ceiling Commission in 1995 (Johns). The glass ceiling is a concept, which was initially introduced in the 1980s (Johns). In fact, it is a metaphor for the artificial obstacles, which prevent females and minorities from climbing the corporate ladder to

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