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The “glass ceiling” metaphor represents the frustration experienced by women in the 1980s and 1990s who entered the workforce in large numbers following equal opportunity legislation that gave them greater access to education and employment. After initial success in attaining lower management positions, the women found their career progress slowing as they reached higher levels of their organizations. A formal definition of the glass ceiling specifies that a female disadvantage in promotion should accelerate at the highest levels of the organization, and researchers adopting this formal definition have found mixed evidence for glass ceilings across organizations and across countries. Researchers who have expanded the glass ceiling definition to encompass racial minorities have similarly found mixed results. However, these mixed results do not detract from the metaphor’s value in highlighting the stereotype-based practices that embed discrimination deep within organizational structures and understanding why women continue to be underrepresented in senior organizational roles around the world. In particular, researchers investigating the glass ceiling have identified a variety of obstacles (including glass cliffs, glass walls, and glass doors) that create a more complete understanding of the barriers that women experience in their careers. As organizations offer shorter job ladders and less job security, the career patterns of both women and men are exhibiting more downward, lateral, and static movement. In this career context, the glass ceiling may no longer be the ideal metaphor to represent the obstacles that women are most likely to encounter.

There is now an international agenda to increase women’s representation at the top of organizations. This agenda is driven in part by a business case arguing that gender diversity brings value, particularly economic value, to organizations. In this article, we review the empirical evidence linking women’s representation in senior leadership roles to countable, verifiable organizational outcomes (e.g., organizational financial performance, practices, and demographics). We consider women’s impact when they are CEOs, directors on corporate boards, members of the top management team, and managers. We conclude that women at the top have an impact on organizational outcomes, but this impact is more visible on organizational practices and organizational demography than on financial performance. We recommend that researchers studying the gender-performance link at the organizational level make their theoretical perspectives explicit, distinguish among mediating mechanisms, be selective in their outcome choices, and increase their emphasis on contextual moderators.

There is now an international agenda to increase women’s representation at the top of organizations. This agenda is driven in part by a business case arguing that gender diversity brings value, particularly economic value, to organizations. In this article, we review the empirical evidence linking women’s representation in senior leadership roles to countable, verifiable organizational outcomes (e.g., organizational financial performance, practices, and demographics). We consider women’s impact when they are CEOs, directors on corporate boards, members of the top management team, and managers. We conclude that women at the top have an impact on organizational outcomes, but this impact is more visible on organizational practices and organizational demography than on financial performance. We recommend that researchers studying the gender-performance link at the organizational level make their theoretical perspectives explicit, distinguish among mediating mechanisms, be selective in their outcome choices, and increase their emphasis on contextual moderators.

Diversity training is an important and widely used component of organizational diversity management initiatives. This chapter reviews theory and research on diversity training design, delivery, evaluation, and effectiveness. The review suggests that in the past 10 to 15 years of research, advancements have been made on several fronts. The research literature on diversity training includes frameworks for pretraining needs assessment, learning models to guide diversity training design choices, and empirical evidence of diversity training’s impact on training outcomes. However, the review also notes two major shortcomings. First, research has emphasized diversity training’s effect on short-term changes in trainees’ knowledge and attitudes, neglecting longer-term changes in their skills and behavior. Second, research has emphasized diversity training’s effect on individual-level learning outcomes, neglecting its impact on team- and organization-level outcomes. These shortcomings are unlikely to be addressed unless scholars and practitioners engage in more collaborative field-based research on diversity training.