The barrier and the stained-glass ceiling. Analyzing female careers in religious organizations

This article surveys existing research (principally in France and the United States) concerning women's access to a religious career based on ordination (as in Christianity and Judaism). In the first part of the article, we look at how the “barrier” that ordination may represent for the feminization of religious management is dealt with. Research on what is at stake when ordaining women into the various religious organizations allows us to point to factors that separate cases where women access religious authority officially, from cases where they only possess it unofficially, and those where they are excluded. The second part looks at “levels”, i.e. the persisting imbalance between feminine and masculine careers in the religious organizations where the prohibition no longer obtains. The comparison with other professional milieus is stressed, since behind the apparently specific nature of a religious universe, mechanisms are often similar, as the expression in our title – “the stained-glass ceiling” – implies.