Raise the Glass Ceiling | Teen Ink

Raise the Glass Ceiling

July 12, 2014
By Repunzel777 SILVER, Mill Valley, California
Repunzel777 SILVER, Mill Valley, California
9 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
"The world goes on, stupid and brutal. But I do not, I do not." Revolution, Jennifer Donnelly


One hundred years ago, women were fighting for the right to vote and the opportunity to go to college. Now we have a different problem. Women make up about 60% of people applying for college and earning degrees. However, there are still many more male bosses and C.E.O.’s than female ones. These numbers do not make any sense.

Peter Coy, a writer for the online newspaper Global Economics, said the gap was due to how society pushes girls to do well in school. We are still stuck in 1910, when women were likely to never go to college and we still think we need to get more women into college. We do not convey the need for school to men as much as we do for women.

However, most colleges do not want a gender gap, said the Los Angeles Times. They think it will help for the school to be “gender-neutral”. When selecting people to go to their school, they try to even out the ratio by accepting the same number of women and men. This means that it is harder for women to be accepted into a college. If colleges truly believed that women and men are equal, it would not matter that the ratio was equal. Schools should accept the best they can find and not worry about what their gender is.

According to Kelvin Pollard of the Population Reference Bureau, in 1969, about 20% of males from ages 25-29 had a bachelor's degree or higher while only about 13% of women had one. Since then, statistics have skyrocketed. In 2009, over 35% of women and 27% of men from ages 25-29 had a bachelor degree or higher. This means that in 40 years the percent of women with degrees has gone up about 22% while the percent of men has only moved 7%.

Although these statistics may look truly optimistic about female power, we still have a long way to go. Even with there being more females with degrees, the number of male bosses and C.E.O.'s still greatly outnumbers female ones. Even when there are more women striving for an education, men are still being selected to be given power. The fact that we still, in the twenty-first century, have not had a woman as president may be an indicator of that. This must change in the future and anybody who reads this should try to create a world where women and men are given the same opportunities.



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