The Glass Ceiling Was Never the Whole Story
Esther Christopher is the founder of Trauma Pain Support Ltd, a speaker, writer, and trauma-informed systems thinker whose work explores the overlooked spaces between crisis, recovery, leadership, and long-term human resilience. Through her writing and framework development, she examines how lived experience can reveal what formal systems often miss.
For decades, the glass ceiling has given us a useful way of talking about women and ambition. You can see the next level. You know you are capable of reaching it. Yet somewhere between where you are and where you want to be sits an invisible barrier that is difficult to name and even harder to prove. The response, understandably, has been to focus on breaking through it.
The climb has changed
Women have been encouraged to become more visible, put themselves forward, negotiate harder, seek sponsorship, take the seat at the table, and keep climbing. Much of that work has mattered. In the United Kingdom (UK), women now occupy more senior and influential positions than they did a generation ago. By the end of 2025, 88% of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 companies had achieved, or were close to achieving, the target of 40% women on their boards.
That progress deserves recognition, but I have begun to wonder whether the glass ceiling has also kept our attention fixed in one direction, up.
We have become particularly good at asking how many women reach senior management, how many sit on boards, and how many become chief executives. These are important measures of progress, particularly when women were excluded from those positions for so long. They are not, however, the only measures available to us.
There comes a point when another question becomes interesting: not simply how far women are progressing within existing organisations, but what women are building and owning themselves. That distinction has become increasingly important to me as a founder.
When the direction of success begins to change
For most of my working life, success was easy to recognise. There was an established organisation, a role, a structure, and usually another level somewhere above the one you occupied. Even when the route upwards was complicated, you broadly understood the architecture. Starting something of your own is different.
There is no floor above you to aim for because, at least in the beginning, there may barely be a floor beneath you. You are no longer navigating a structure. You are deciding what the structure will be.
That sounds liberating, and in many ways it is, but “freedom” is probably too simple a word for it. What changes most profoundly is authorship.
You decide how decisions will be made and where authority will sit. You decide what the organisation will stand for and then discover whether you are prepared to live by those values when doing so becomes inconvenient. You decide what growth means rather than assuming bigger must automatically mean better. Even the definition of success begins to shift.
For years, many of us have worked with somebody else’s scoreboard without necessarily realising it: the next promotion, the larger remit, the more senior title, another step up a hierarchy whose shape was established long before we arrived.
When you build something yourself, you are forced to decide what winning actually looks like. Perhaps you want scale. Perhaps you want influence. Perhaps you want a business that can eventually operate without you. Perhaps you want to create something that changes a particular part of the world and makes enough money to sustain doing it. There is no universal answer.
The conversation we have less often: Ownership
There is another part of this discussion that I think deserves far more attention. When you build an organisation, you are not only creating a job for yourself. If you build it well, you may be creating an asset.
The intellectual property, systems, relationships, reputation, and knowledge you develop can accumulate into something with value beyond the work you personally perform each day. For a founder, that changes the nature of the work. You are no longer contributing solely to the value of an organisation that already exists, you are creating value in something you own.
That makes me wonder whether our discussion about women’s advancement has sometimes been too narrow.
We have rightly asked whether women have access to opportunity and whether they are represented where important decisions are made. Perhaps we should also be asking who owns the value they create.
The numbers suggest there is still quite a difference between the two. The UK government’s latest Longitudinal Small Business Survey found that around 14% of Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) employers were women-led. That sits alongside the considerable progress women have made in corporate leadership and tells us something interesting: representation within existing organisations and ownership of businesses are not the same journey.
Building your own does not remove the barriers
Becoming a founder does not somehow remove the structural barriers women have experienced elsewhere. Money makes that particularly visible. The British Business Bank has reported that only 2p in every £1 of UK venture capital investment goes to female-founded businesses. Now, there is something almost brutally simple about that figure. A woman may decide she wants to create the organisation rather than climb within one, but deciding to build is not the same as being given the resources to build it.
There are signs of improvement. Among organisations participating in the Investing in Women Code, the proportion of venture capital investment going to teams with at least one female founder increased from 27% in 2024 to 32% in 2025. That is encouraging, although it also shows why the wider financing conversation remains necessary. Entrepreneurship, then, is not an uncomplicated escape from organisational life.
It would be easy to write that version of the story. Leave the job, become your own boss, control your time, and finally do things your way. Anyone who has actually built a business knows how incomplete that picture is. You exchange one set of constraints for another. The uncertainty belongs to you. The financial responsibility belongs to you. So do the decisions that turn out to be wrong.
If something stops working inside a large organisation, there is usually an infrastructure around the problem. When you own the organisation, the infrastructure may also be something you are responsible for creating. The freedom is real, but so is the weight.
Two distinct kinds of power
Perhaps that is why I find the founder story more interesting when we stop presenting it as an alternative fairy tale to the corporate ladder.
Some women will continue to rise through established organisations, and I hope they do. We need women running major companies, sitting around board tables, and changing institutions from within. Others will create businesses, organisations, intellectual property, and new models of working. Neither path is inherently more ambitious than the other, but they represent distinct kinds of power. One is the ability to rise within a structure and influence what happens there, while the other is the ability to create the structure in the first place.
For a long time, we have measured women’s progress vertically. How high did she go? What title did she reach? Did she finally get into the room? Perhaps the next stage of that conversation needs to become wider. What did she create? What does she control? What assets did she build? How much of the value she generates does she own, and what might happen if more women had access to the capital, confidence, networks, and support required to answer those questions for themselves?
The glass ceiling was never the whole story
The glass ceiling remains a useful metaphor. There are still barriers above women that need to be identified and removed, and progress should not depend on women simply working harder to overcome them. But the ceiling was never the whole story. Sometimes progress is about reaching the next floor. Sometimes it is about realising that there are other things you could build.
Read more from Esther Christopher
Esther Christopher, Trauma Pain Support
Esther Christopher is the founder of Trauma Pain Support Ltd. (TPS), a trauma-informed recovery program helping road traffic accident (RTA) survivors rebuild physically, emotionally, and mentally. After overcoming her own life-changing road traffic accident, Esther developed the TPS framework to bridge the gap between medical recovery and long-term healing. A certified Total Breakthrough Coach, author, and nutritionist, she combines professional expertise with lived experience to guide others toward sustainable transformation. Her memoir, Triumph Over Tragedy, chronicles her journey from survival to purpose, inspiring others to reclaim their strength and identity.
