pink ceiling
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.02 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for gay and lesbian people.
Example Sentences
- "That was nearly twenty years ago, and the Rev. David Norgard, who now serves as rector of St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco, has spent much of those two decades quietly cracking the pink ceiling in the Episcopal Church."
- "On September 21, 1998, the American TV channel NBC broadcast the first episode of their new sitcom Will And Grace. There was some advance interest among gay viewers and city sophisticates as it marked the shattering of the "pink ceiling" - there were now homosexual lead characters on a major network prime-time show, and their lifestyle wasn't an issue."
- "Tomorrow Susman, 43, now executive vice president of global communications for the Este Lauder Cos. Inc. in New York, will moderate a panel of five homosexual business executives about the pink ceiling and what corporate executives can do to break it."
Etymology
pink (“relating to homosexuals as a group within society”) + ceiling (“suggesting a barrier to upward advancement”), modeled after glass ceiling.