Why Do Women Still Experience Downward Gravitation in the Corporate Ladder? A Close Look at Glass Ceiling in Bahrain‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Gender discrimination at the workplace has long been a debated issue (Arrow 1971, Lazear & Rosen 1990, Bernard & Laband 1995). The patterns of gender segregation are persistent and are decipherable in covert and overt ways (Arrow 1971, Kaufmann, Isaksen & Lauer 1996, Arfken, Bellar & Helms 2004, Anderson 2006, Zeng 2008), despite much announced and promising equal employment opportunity claims by organisations across time. Though globalisation and equal employment opportunity regimes have opened up many avenues of corporate placements, yet women are still less represented when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder (Grout, Park & Sonderegger 2009, International Labour Organisation (ILO) 2010a, 2010b). The ILO underscores that fair globalisation can be achieved by creating opportunities for all, which enable men and women to meet their aspirations for democratic participation and material prosperity. The decent work notion envisions a nonpartisan treatment at worksite. However, regardless of promising equal employment opportunity policies, women employees are often knocked down on the imperceptible, but inextricably institutionalised and repressive, transparent barricades, which is technically called the glass ceiling. Hence, this phenomenon in organisational settings implicitly conveys that the opportunity to get promoted to higher echelons in the corridors of organisational power and authority is not as easy as that of being absorbed into organisational fraternity.