The Impact of Glass Ceiling Factors on Women Career Development

Abstract

Concerns of gender equality are discussed in 1978 constitution of Sri Lanka and in other national policies. Anyhow as per the labour force surveys females are not in higher rank positions in Sri Lanka even though their contribution for the labour force increases rapidly and this scenario is more severe in the garment sector. According to this problem, the researcher investigated the impact of glass ceiling factors such as individual factors, training and development, work family conflict, organizational factors and cultural factors on women career development at leading apparel manufacturer, in Sri Lanka based on the conceptual frame work developed using the literature of current study. Simple random sampling method has been used to select 63 female executive and self-administrative questionnaire distributed to collect the data. Hypotheses are developed to find out whether there is a significant impact of glass ceiling factors on Women career development and tested by using multiple regression analysis. Findings of the study identified that all the selected glass ceiling factors except organizational cultural factors have significant negative impact on women career development. Moreover, it revealed that work family conflict is the highest impacted factor. Hence management of the company should be much concern on balancing work family conflicts and practice the discrimination policy effectively. The findings of this study mostly helpful in making management decisions to reduce the invisible barriers of women career development and this makes a novel contribution to the garment industry by being among the first to examine of that industry in Sri Lanka.