The ‘Glass Ceiling’ Is Tired. Women Are ‘Reinventing the Game.’

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“The highest and hardest glass ceiling has so many cracks in it, it is well on its way to becoming an outdated standard.”

— Amy Klobuchar, Democratic president candidate, responding to a question about whether the term “glass ceiling” is losing its appeal

When Christine Lagarde was nominated by the European Council to be the next president of the European Central Bank, the first woman to hold the position, critics wondered if the move was indicative of the “glass cliff” — the phenomenon in which women seem more likely to be put in charge of an organization at a crisis point. (The E.C.B. is grappling with a sluggish eurozone economy.) 

And when Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is running for president, was asked in a town hall recently if she was worried about being “Hillary’d” — apparent shorthand for the sexism Hillary Clinton faced in the 2016 election — Warren respond that she would “persist.” 

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Remember when the blanket term for gender bias was simply “glass ceiling”? 

As my colleague Jessica Bennett wrote in a front-page story thisweek, that term — ever-present in Clinton’s campaigns — seems to be a relic of a different era, replaced by a variety of more nuanced expressions to describe the barriers of race and gender. 

[READ MORE: Who Still Calls it a ‘Glass Ceiling’? Not the 6 Women Running for President]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old Congresswoman from New York, prefers to “break the table” and “build our own house.” 

Ayanna S. Pressley, the first black woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts, has noted that women of color candidates face not simply a “glass ceiling” but a “concrete” one — struggling to overcome both racial and gender biases. “Double jeopardy” is another term to describe the double whammy of discrimination black women face. (The term “bamboo ceiling” has been used to refer to the unique challenges Asian-Americans face.)

There is also the “likability trap” to talk about the challenges female leaders face by having to prove they are tough and likable at once. Similarly, a “double-bind” is when women are disliked for being direct and decisive, but are not seen as leaders when nice and nurturing. 

And there’s the “motherhood penalty,” for the disadvantages, financial and otherwise, specific to mothers who work outside the home (as relative to their childless peers). 

Why is this generation of influential women seeking different language to express themselves?

“Words have their moments, especially colloquialisms,” Robin Lakoff, whose 1975 book, “Language and Woman’s Place,” helped create the field of gender linguistics, told Bennett. “Often, after a word or phrase gets a lot of use, people simply stop using it — because we like to sound original and this one seems tired.”

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