The Impact of Glass Ceiling on Female Career Advancement: The Case of the Educational Sector of the Mezam and Fako Divisions of Cameroon

Glass ceiling syndrome” is one of the primary hidden barriers that prohibit the progression of talented women professionals from ascending senior executive positions in most formal organizations like schools Cameroon. This barrier faced by women in the said country is an unwritten rule in many business and non-business organizations, despite the fact that the number of women in top-level corporate jobs remain blocked in their career journey. This is a call for concern and thus this work centres on ‘Assessing the Impact of Glass Ceiling on Female Career Progression in the Educational sector of the Mezam and Fako Divisions of Cameroon’. It summarizes barriers that work to keep women in traditional “sticky floors” where they remain stock at those floor levels, unable to make any swift journey to positions of leadership, unless sexually harassed sometimes in order to gain a position of authority. The objectives of the study seek to assess the factors that influence glass ceiling experienced by women employees in the Study Area. Secondly, it examines the direct and indirect effects of glass ceiling syndrome on women career advancement in these sectors of the two Divisions. The methods used for data collection are interviews and questionnaires administered to 530 women in schools and banks of the two regions. The Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for hypothesis testing and as a tool for inferential statistics. This is a fitting model because it analyses several variables simultaneously-even the unobservable, hard-to-measure latent variables like Glass ceiling and female career development. Results indicated that the barriers have a 52% impact on glass ceiling and the Glass ceiling syndrome in turn has a negative effect on female career progression by 62%. It was discovered that out of the 1462 Administrators or Heads of Institutions in the two regions of study, 1063 are men and only 399 are women. Some strategies are proposed to combat the negative effect of glass ceiling on the career progression of these women. They are: consciousness raising, career planning, management training, information sharing, mentoring, networking, and retraining. In order to shrink glass ceiling effect, some women are quitting their jobs and setting up their business, becoming freelancers in order to have more control over their career trajectory.