the.com/glass ceiling

means An unacknowledged, invisible barrier — especially one built from bias rather than policy — that stops certain people, often women and minorities, from rising past a certain level in a career or organization.

from Coined in American business writing around the early 1980s as a visual metaphor: a ceiling made of glass, so the floors above look completely open — you can see the corner office, see the title, see the raise — but hit an unmarked, unofficial limit the moment you try to rise into it. No one wrote the barrier into any rulebook, which was exactly the point of the phrase: it named a discrimination that denied its own existence.