Does Breaking Through the •Œfinal Glass Ceilingâ•Š Really Pave The
Does Breaking Through the “Final Glass Ceiling” Really Pave the Way for Subsequent Women to Become Heads of State? 1 Does Breaking Through the “Final Glass Ceiling” Really Pave the Way for Subsequent Women to Become Heads of State? By Katherine Rocha, Joseph Palazzo, Rebecca Teczar and Roger Clark Rhode Island College Abstract Women’s ascension to the role of national president or prime minister of any country is a relatively new phenomenon in world history. The first woman to break the “final glass ceiling,” Sirinavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (Sri Lanka today), did it in 1960, just 58 years ago. Since then, the ceiling has been broken in about 83 nations worldwide, but we still know little about what it takes for women to achieve such national leadership roles. Previous research (e.g., Jalalzai, 2013; Skard, 2015) has pointed to the importance of family connections, political turmoil, and the nature of a country’s political system. But only one study (Jalalzai, 2013) provided quantitative, cross-national support for any of these observations. Our paper replicates Jalalzai’s analysis, done using data from the first decade of the twenty-first century, with data from the second decade. We find that there have been dramatic changes over time. We find that family connections are now no more useful for explaining women’s rise to presidencies and prime ministerial positions than men’s; that, in fact, women are now more likely to rise in politically stable nation states than in fragile ones. And, perhaps most importantly, women are much more likely to ascend to the highest positions in countries where they have already broken the “final glass ceiling.” Keywords: final glass ceiling, women presidents, women prime ministers Introduction In a course on the Sociology of Gender we had learned that, while such a ceiling might exist in Following Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 U.S.
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