Hillary Clinton’s Candidacy and Barack Obama’s Presidency:

Abstract

This dissertation explored the phenomenon of the glass ceiling in the American political context. It emphasized its substantial impact of halting women and racial minorities from obtaining influential elective public offices, and it shed the light on the presidency of Barack Obama of 2008, besides the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton 2016. Historically speaking, the phrase “glass ceiling” was officially first introduced in the Wall Street Journal in 1986, referring to the invisible barriers that crippled women from accessing to the end of the upper spectrum in corporate America. Since then, the term was popularized and extended to embrace also minorities and a wide range of fields including politics. Voluminous research was conducted to detect the sources of the phenomenon and to suggest remedies to eliminate those hurdles. Politically, data revealed that U.S. lags behind a bunch of countries worldwide in terms of women and racial minorities‟ political representation at the federal and legislative level. Internally, the political underrepresentation of women and racial minorities dated back to their inferior status since the early days of the fledgling democratic nation. Statistics indicated that women and racial minorities are severely underrepresented at the national, state and local echelons, in relation to their respective populations. The blocks produced by the glass ceiling are blamed for these upshots. Based on data from the political scene about the representation of women and racial minorities in the governmental bodies, this research concluded that the cherished values of democracy in America and its reality epitomized by the phenomenon of the glass ceiling are of a sort of paradox. However, did the presidency of Barack Obama in 2008 alongside with the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in 2016 mean that a break in the enduring political glass ceiling has just happened? Accordingly, this study attempted to dig down and find relevant answer to this question.