I would like to issue a challenge: Let’s junk the image of the glass ceiling as the metaphor for the barriers women face in today’s workplace. Don’t get me wrong—I get it that with all the women in today’s workplace and all the young women now graduating from college, it seems obvious that there should be more women in corner offices in large companies than there are. Of course there are barriers out there.

It’s just that I think the image of the glass ceiling doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did. And it may be doing more harm than good. In the end, it implies that you either “win” or you “lose.” And if you “win,” there will have to be major collateral damage—think of all that broken glass falling on people’s heads!

Even more troubling about the image is that it devalues the choices working women (and for that matter working men), make every day. It implies that a decision not to pursue the top job as a career goal is to surrender, to give up, to admit failure.

As a family woman and a successful career woman, I have some personal history in this area. Naturally, I’ve thought a lot about it and I continue to think a lot about it. My conclusion is that like so many other issues in life, the workplace, for women as well as for men, is more about choices than barriers. It is about making choices, and having made them, embracing them free of negative baggage.

Recently I had a chance to review a study that came out of McKinsey & Company in 2012. McKinsey researchers looked at data from 60 corporations in the Fortune 500 size range, surveyed thousands of their employees and interviewed 200 of their female executives. For me some of what it found was enlightening, but more of it confirmed things that I have suspected for a long time to be the case. Here are some highlights and some thoughts about them:

1. Most employees, both men and women, want to advance. But the higher they get up the ladder the less they want to go all the way to the top. But the percentage of entry-level and mid-level women (18%) who want to make it to the C-Suite is only half the percentage of men (36%).
    

1. Women opt out of line jobs in favor of staff jobs earlier in their careers (i.e., from lower rungs on the career ladder) than men. Line jobs generally demand more time and travel and are less stable than staff jobs. But line jobs return greater rewards and higher career advancement.
    

1. Anecdotally, the study concluded that women are more reluctant to seek out mentors than men. (Personally, I recall a conversation I had some years ago with a senior executive who was nearing retirement from a Detroit-area professional firm. He lamented that mentoring in firms like his had become virtually non-existent. A major reason was that most of the qualified mentors were male and most of the potential mentees were female. The men, who had been mentored when they were young in an informal but effective mentoring “system,” were uncomfortable with the prospect of mentoring young women. Today mentoring programs are more formal, but only somewhat successful because of that same reluctance.)
    

1. The report identified four barriers to advancement for women. It characterized these barriers as “stubborn”:
   
   1. Structural obstacles (i.e., existing structures that are hard to break into simply because they are still virtually all male)
   
   2. Lifestyle obstacles (More women than men identified themselves as both the primary breadwinners and primary caregivers in their families. Because of that fact, they choose to slow their careers to accommodate their home lives.)
   
   3. Individual mind-sets (Even successful female executives regretted that they did not more aggressively seek out sponsors/mentors when they were younger.)
   
   4. Institutional mind-sets (Men are willing to help women move up, but they expect women to act like men. If they don’t come and ask for help, how can you help them?)

As I look at these barriers I don’t doubt them at all—they are real. But it strikes me that every one of them can be overcome by plain determination and persistence, albeit in huge amounts. Conversely, individual decisions to stop climbing the ladder at various rungs along the way are not capitulations but choices. Men make those same choices all the time without carrying the baggage of having given up or capitulated.

Women have a world of options in front of them. Let’s embrace those options, let’s make our choices, and let’s reject the baggage.

And once and for all, let’s throw the image of the glass ceiling on the junk heap.