Sticky Floor Metaphor

Trippingly on the tongue.

Sticky floor metaphor. The sticky floor metaphor is one where women somehow hold themselves back either unwittingly or by design. Is a metaphor sometimes used to convey the difficulties that disadvantaged groups experience in moving from the bottom of the organizational hierarchy. Words alone sometimes convey their meanings too narrowly whereas metaphors allow imagination to roam more freely only loosely tethered to definitions. Thereby this phenomenon is related to gender differentials at the bottom of the wage distribution.

Expression used as a metaphor to point to a discriminatory employment pattern that keeps workers mainly women in the lower ranks of the job scale with low mobility and invisible barriers to career advancement. Whose undoing is not so much out there but in here. Whereas the glass ceiling evokes the idea of a barrier preventing access to management grades the sticky floor focuses attention on the first stage of progression where discrimination can be experienced. Perhaps content to reach a certain level and to call it a day.

Sticky floors can be described as the pattern that women are compared to men less likely to start to climb the job ladder.