WHAT GLASS CEILING?
It is the spring of 1997 in San Jose, California, and a rapt audience of 3,000 women of Hewlett Packard listen to the speaker’s tale. It is a story of a woman who chased her dream to work in the technical field—the field of space travel. She takes them on a journey through her career, sharing how her childhood dream of flying to Mars led to her role in helping to land the Sojourner Rover.
The speech intends to give the women in the audience a sense that in their careers, anything is possible. The speech is motivating, but despite the speaker’s best intentions, it can’t disguise one fact: Ample evidence demonstrates that pervasive barriers still exist for women in STEM. The attrition rate for women in STEM is around 50 percent—an ...
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