Study Of Women Advancement Of The It Industry "glass Ceiling"

With the development of polity, economy and culture, women's life and working circumstances have attracted lots of attention. Women now are given almost equal development platform as their male counterparts. More and more women have become members of management team. Nevertheless the progress achieved can not gloss over a fact: the higher the management ladder is, the fewer women were found. Men far outnumber women in top management. "Glass Ceiling" was first used in 1986 by American journalists Hymowitz and Schellhardt in their article titled "Glass Ceiling" in Wall Street Journal. It implies all kinds of invisible obstacles of women's moving up to the top management. Though it has been more than two decades since the first use of the phrase "glass ceiling", this phenomenon has not been fundamentally changed and improved all over the world. According to surveys, woman managers are far fewer than male counterparts in China.Experts in various research fields have taken massive researches, trying to analyze the real reasons for discrimination against women in job openings, career choice, salary, promotion and so on. To sum up, four perspectives including individual, family, society and organization has become the focus.Taking the above mentioned four perspectives, the paper chooses women in Information Technology (IT) as subjects and probes into the hidden influencing factors which are in the way of a woman's career development. Besides, it tries to find out which factor is playing a dominant role. Due to different personal backgrounds of the subjects such as age, post and education background, this paper carries a contrast research to find out whether different groups have different cognition of "glass ceiling" phenomenon.SPSS 11.5 is used in analyzing valid questionnaires amongl02 are done by office lady. The result of the analysis is listed as follows. The Chinese female did not perceive the existence of glass ceiling. Female's personal factors such as personal desires, incentives and etc constitute obstructions of their career development. Organization have shown the strongest influence at all the three levels of society, family and social stereotype and social policies. There is no obvious difference between obstructive effect of family factors and that of social factors. For female, to realize oneself ,she must try to own the two roles' characteristics which were valued well by society, We also should have open mind on sex roles, and try our best to build a free and open social environment.