Introduction:

The glass ceiling effect is a term named after a feminist movement in the 1980s in the United States referring to an “invisible” barrier that impedes women’s progress in their working careers.

Objective:

To analyze the presence of the glass ceiling effect in nursing in the available state of the art.

Materials and Methods:

An integrative review was conducted following Crossetti’s five steps and using descriptors such as nursing, board of directors, nurs- ing supervision, leadership, gender inequality and sexism, which have been validated in DeCS thesaurus and linked with the Boolean And operation on WoS, PubMed, Scopus, SciELO and BVS databases.

Results:

After applying descriptors and search strategies, 133 articles were initially retrieved of which, after applying filters, 43 articles were selected to finally obtain 6 articles after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria. After a manual search, 2 articles were found to make a sample of 8 articles on which a scaling proposal was applied to ensure sample quality, resulting in 7 articles.

Discussion:

Selected articles indicated limited female representation of nurses in managerial positions, emphasizing that men are better compensated in terms of remuneration, professional advancement, and better and more prestigious positions.

Conclusions:

Analyzed articles reflect the presence of the glass ceiling effect in which female nurses have more difficulties than men in accessing managerial positions by an apparent etiology merely marked by gender.

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