Abstract:

The issue of gender diversity and stereotypes related to their impact on culturally and socially conditioned performance of social, and especially work roles, has continuously caused controversy in the sociological literature since the middle of the last century. Although Croatian society gender equality has reached a satisfactory level in the formal legal framework, we often witness that equal rights do not imply equal opportunities in social reality.

This paper primarily focuses on the glass ceiling theory assumptions and its incidence in the attitudes of Croatian female scientists in comparison to other sectors employed females in Croatia. The main aim of the paper is to compare the Croatian female scientists attitudes towards the glass ceiling theory assumptions with other female employed respondents in all other areas of employment (apart from science) to determine their attitudes similarities and/or differences.
The data for this analysis have been collected through an online survey using snowball method, in a period from June until September 2019 on the representative sample of 1602 female respondents in all areas of employment. The overall number of female scientists in the survey conducted is 675 (41,7%).

The paper examines the attitudes of women scientists and non-scientists on whether women are equally capable of performing higher managerial positions as men, how women are promoted from entry positions to higher managerial positions, how many women are represented in governing bodies, whether they receive the same salary as and men, and how many obstacles there are in advancing woman’s careers in science when compared to other occupations. The paper also examines the differences in attitudes on these issues of women scientists and non-scientists with a non-parametric test, namely the Chi Square Test of Independence, which determines whether there is an association between categorical variables.

The study results reveal noticeable differences towards glass ceiling theory assumptions in two groups of female respondents observed proving how we need to work more on education policy for gender equality towards the full implementation of gender equality in Croatian national society.

Keywords:

Female scientists, glass ceiling theory, gender diversity, women career development.