Examine the situation of women in senior positions in your own country. Explore the Web sites to learn more about the women who are either the CEO or chairperson at these companies. The Web sites might have profiles so you can learn more about the CEO and other top executives.

Another possibility to gather some background on the careers of executive women is to use a search engine such as Yahoo! and search on the company name and name of the CEO or chairperson. Develop a rationale to explain how these women overcame the “glass ceiling” and attained the top executive role in a business in your own country. What country-specific hurdles faced them and how did they overcome them?

“Glass ceiling” refers to invisible or artificial barriers that prevent women and people of color from advancing above a certain level in an organization. In the United States, women represent 30 percent of all managers but less than 5 percent of executives.
The glass ceiling does not represent a typical form of discrimination that consists of entry barriers to women and minorities within organizations.
Rather, it represents a subtle form of discrimination that includes gender stereotypes, lack of opportunities for women to gain job experiences necessary for advancement, and lack of top-management commitment to providing resources to promote initiatives that support an environment for women to advance to the top executive ranks.
As an invisible barrier, the glass ceiling is difficult to crash through legislation. Informal networking and mentoring are often mentioned as ways of increasing opportunities for women to become executives. However, cross-gender relationships between a male mentor and a female employee may be discouraged by the sexual tensions that arise in such relationships, because they can become close, blurring the distinction between their professional and personal lives. In some instances, a mentoring relationship with a younger female may threaten the established male with the potential for a career-wrecking allegation of sexual harassment in which the woman is viewed as the victim, because she ranks lower in the hierarchy. Although same-gender female mentoring relationships are less likely to be as problematic as the cross-gender ones, they depend on the availability of senior female executives willing and able to nurture high-potential women.
Despite the glass ceiling, by 2012 the number of women who achieved the position of chief executive officer (CEO) or chairman of a major Fortune 500 corporation in the United States was much greater than the number of women who were top executives in large corporations in 1997. Here are some women executives who have clearly broken through the glass ceiling, as of 2012:

Ginni Rometty, CEO and Chairman of IBM 

Indra Nooyi, CEO and Chairperson of PepsiCo 

Irene Rosenfeld, CEO and Chairman of Mondele¯z International, Inc.

Ursula Burns, CEO and Chairman of Xerox 

Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard 

Ellen Kullman, CEO and Chairman of DuPont