Glass ceiling?

There is an article in the Sun-Times about how:

Women continue to bang their heads against barriers, despite making limited gains in advancing to the top leadership positions at the Chicago area's 50 biggest companies, according to a report.

The report goes on to mention that there's not even close to 50% of directors being women.

I don't understand how anyone can be surprised by this. First, women are much more likely than men to either abandon or put on hold their careers for the sake of raising their children. Moving up into the top ranks of a company takes a huge commitment of time an energy, and the maternal instinct gets in the way for a huge number of women.

In addition, men are more aggressive and driven to succeed in their careers, overall. This comes down to basic biology. (Now, I don't really give a rip about professional advancement, but like I say this is a generalization of the overall population.)

Another lesser factor is the choice of careers between the sexes. Many more women go into careers as nurses, secretaries, teachers, and whatnot. Of course, the converse of that is that men tend to disproportionately enter blue collar manual- and skilled-labor careers, which will also limit their chance of advancement. Like I wrote, this is a small factor, but I imagine it exists.

These factors are so overwhelmingly obvious to me that drivel like this seems like nonsense:

"I don't think there's any nefarious plot going on here," she said. "I think it's that when we tend to pick people with whom we're going to serve, we tend to pick those people that we're most comfortable with, and those people we're most comfortable with most of the time look just like us. So unless there's a pointed effort to change, change does not happen."

That's crap. If it were true, there would be almost no women in high positions. As it is, the numbers are much higher than that:

The percent of women directors increased to 14.3 from 13.8 last year, the report found. But that followed a drop last year. The past decade, the number of women directors rose to 76 from 61, or an average of 1.5 women a year. Women make up 14.3 percent of all directors, up from 10.1 percent.

Any time I hear about how women or minorities are underrepresented in any area due to a glass ceiling, the way to counteract that is obvious: start a firm of all women executives (or engineers, or whatever), pay them less than market rates (since there are fewer of them), and then rake in the money. The fact that this reaction to the problem using simple market forces isn't occurring is the best evidence that there is no real problem of discrimination except in the minds of grievance-mongers.

UPDATE: These five people have it wrong. Annette Burtin sounds like someone who doesn't work hard enough to succeed and then complains later about those mean boys, while Gerene Hayes is a SECRETARY. You have reached your professional pinnacle, lady, so what would you know? Jessica Simon is a 23-year-old (read: naive) teacher who also won't ever advance beyond, well, teacher, so does she have any idea what the professional world is like? The answer is no. The first guy didn't answer the question and the second made a dumb joke.