The idea behind the glass ceiling metaphor, is that there are invisible barriers that keep minorities and/or women from positions of power. But when I think about the portrayal of women in media and social media, I realize that there are some very visible, sometimes blatant and sometimes subtle, ways that make that ‘glass ceiling’ much more opaque.

I do not always recognize this myself.

Yesterday I shared this tweet and image: (I decided not to link to it)

1980’s: Experts agree that…

2010’s: It’s true, I read it on Facebook… 🤔

To me, that’s both insightful and funny. Then I received this response in a tweet from Natasha Knox:

So true!

Side note – do you find the male/female representation in this meme problematic, or is it just me?

To which I responded:

Ouch, now I notice it.

The use of gender roles here is problematic in more that just one way!

When my two daughters were younger, they used to love Dora the Explorer. This is a great cartoon with a female hero (recently a movie too, but I haven’t seen it). In the cartoon, Dora relies on two animated objects: a map and a backpack to help her on her adventures. Dora has to ask the male map which way to go. The female backpack always needs ‘your help’ to figure out what item in the backpack Dora needs. Intentionally sexist? I doubt it. Perpetuating gender stereotypes? Absolutely!

It is this perpetuation of gender stereotypes that I think makes the glass ceiling more opaque than people realize. Because looking through that ceiling, or rather breaking through that ceiling doesn’t always get women to the same place that men above that ceiling are. Not when expectations and preconceived stereotypes are different when women are in those roles. I think ‘problematic’ depictions of women, like the 2 examples above, are seldom done with an intentional bias, but they are done far more than people think. One or two examples may not seem like much, but done over and over again, on many forms of media and across many social media platforms, I think things like this can become normalized and self-perpetuate. That it is not necessarily intentional is what makes the issue so cloudy. That it is sometimes intentionally perpetuated makes things even worse.

I think it is important to identify and call out these biases. Where have you seen them recently?