Book Review, Kerri Stone's, Panes of the Glass Ceiling

Rona Kaufman Kitchen, Feminist Legal Theory and Stone's Panes of the Glass Ceiling, 17 FIU L. Rev. 771 (2023).

In her book, Panes of the Glass Ceiling: The Unspoken Beliefs Behind the Law’s Failure to Help Women Achieve Professional Parity, Professor Kerri Lynn Stone explores and deconstructs the many practical reasons why women have been unable to achieve equality in employment. Professor Stone painstakingly deconstructs the belief systems that underlie the American workplace and the path to professional success to reveal many of the nuanced reasons why women, despite their education, skill, and commitment to the workforce, continue to struggle to achieve professional success comparative to men. Stone insightfully explains why women continue to experience irremediable discrimination in employment almost sixty years after Congress outlawed sex discrimination in employment. Stone’s book is a long overdue deconstruction and indictment of the toxic masculinity and seemingly benign social norms that pervade workplace culture and its negative impact on women and equality. Her book is geared toward an audience that wants to understand the problems women face in employment today and solve those problems. While she provides historical context for many of the beliefs that ground the panes of the glass ceiling, her focus is not on theory or history. It is a book about the reality of 2022 and a map for how to shift that reality in 2023 and beyond.

This book review seeks to provide deeper grounding for Stone’s panes of the glass ceiling by placing her work in the broader historical and theoretical context of feminism, the women’s movement, and the history of women in the American labor force. This discussion proceeds in three parts. Part I provides the historical context for discrimination against women in the American workplace and anti-discrimination law by tracing the evolution of the modern women’s movement and the history of women’s participation in the labor force. Part II discusses Professor Kerri Stone’s panes of the glass ceiling and places each pane in theoretical context. Part III concludes with a brief discussion of how Stone’s articulation of the panes or the glass ceiling and her suggestions for reform contribute to the ongoing feminist legal theory discourse.