ABSTRACT

So here I am, a retired university professor. Would I write about how I negotiated the glass ceiling to become a manager in higher education, the editors asked me. Well, I think I know what they meant, but is that what I did? I have two problems: first, I don’t recognize the glass ceiling. Second, I didn’t set out to become a ‘manager in higher education’. There were professors of various kinds in my youth and heads of departments, but managers were in industry and commerce. And anyway, I didn’t set out to become a professor, although professors from afar seemed quite admirable. The image of the glass ceiling (‘a barrier to personal advancement, especially of a woman or members of ethnic minorities’, Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 1993)—which somewhere along the way and relatively recently in terms of my life time slipped into women’s discussions —has never been evocative for me and still isn’t (see Introduction to this volume for further discussion of the term). I don’t know how to interpret it. The image of a glass wall I used to use with beginning sociology students when trying to help them to understand that they had not chosen a soft option but a rigorous discipline. This sought to illustrate the teasing quality of sociology, namely that each of us has to be our own sociologist in order to live in the world at all, but that the discipline of sociology goes beyond common sense and

requires the analysis of carefully collected data, of concepts and of theories. The image was of thinking one could see the way forward, walking along easily so long as one’s homespun sociology applied, but bumping into an unnoticed glass wall through which there is a way but one that requires hard work and diligence to find. This is different from the idea of a glass ceiling. Ceilings are above the head. One does not bump into them (unless levitating). Ceilings are got above by going up stairs or elevators, often from outside the ceiling’s room.