Abstract

Owing to growing strategic value of diverse human capital as a competitive edge for the organizations, the international development community is actively concerned to address the significant asymmetry between the male and female professional careers, especially when it comes to attain the highest echelons of management. Men are still earning more than women for comparable work and progressing more easily up the career ladder than women do. This phenomenon of invisible barrier in the career advancement of female managers is commonly termed as ‘glass ceiling’ and is mainly considered to be composed of stereotypes about females’ prescriptive roles and domain in the society. This qualitative research study, conducted in the public sector of Pakistan using the Federal Civil Service as a case in hand, has attempted to gather empirical evidence as to how each stratum of the ‘gender stratification system’ contribute to impede the female career progression by way of creating, sustaining and strengthening the gendered stereotypes in the work places. It was also aimed at looking for the evidence of gender ‘undoing’ at any or each level of the system. The female performance model emerging out of the primary data of this study revealed a number of stumbling blocks in the career path of females composed of gendered stereotypes produced, perpetuated and reinforced at all three levels, individual, social and institutional, of the stratification system. It was also concluded from the empirical data that any incidence of change at any one level is not expected to sustain unless complimented with a corresponding change in the other two levels.