Corporate India may claim that the glass ceiling is shattered today. It boasts of women like Indra Nooyi, Naina Lal Kidwai, Lalita Gupte and Chanda Kochhar but the meteoric rise of a handful of women can hardly justify or shake the tradition that started in 1236 AD. This article highlights glass ceiling and its manifestation through the case of Razia Sultana.

On October 15, 2007, Hillary Clinton, candidate for US Presidential Elections 2008, said, "Women voters could shatter America's `highest glass ceiling' and make her its first female president."

But the Democratic Party's presidential candidate was Barack Obama, an Afro-American male. Clinton supporters claim that Senator Hillary Clinton has failed because she could not shatter the proverbial glass ceiling.

"The glass ceiling that is holding women executives back is not just above them, it's all around them, in the whole structure of the organization; the beams, the walls, the very air most of the barriers that persist today are insidious,a revolution couldn't find them to blast them away."

The concept of glass ceiling surfaced in the US in the late 1970s. Glass ceiling was not a barrier to an individual as such, but a barrier to women and other minorities as a group.

The US Department of Labor has defined `Glass Ceiling' as "an artificial barrier based on attitudinal or organizational bias that prevents qualified women and other minorities from advancing upward in their organization into senior management level positions."

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