pink ceiling

pink (“relating to homosexuals as a group within society”) + ceiling (“suggesting a barrier to upward advancement”)

pink ceiling (plural pink ceilings)

1. An informal (and often unacknowledged) barrier to promotion or advancement, in employment and elsewhere, for gay and lesbian people.
   • 1996, Don Lattin, "Gay Priest Is Cracking Through the Bias Ceiling", The San Francisco Chronicle, 29 June 1996:

     That was nearly twenty years ago, and the Rev. David Norgard, who now serves as rector of St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco, has spent much of those two decades quietly cracking the pink ceiling in the Episcopal Church.

   • 2004, Stephan Phelan, "Where There's A Will there's a Grace", The Sunday Herald, 29 August 2004:

     On September 21, 1998, the American TV channel NBC broadcast the first episode of their new sitcom Will And Grace. There was some advance interest among gay viewers and city sophisticates as it marked the shattering of the "pink ceiling" - there were now homosexual lead characters on a major network prime-time show, and their lifestyle wasn't an issue.

   • 2006, Joseph A. Slobodzian, "Breaking through the 'pink ceiling': Many gays and lesbians face career hurdles in corporate workplace", The Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 May 2006:

     Tomorrow Susman, 43, now executive vice president of global communications for the Este Lauder Cos. Inc. in New York, will moderate a panel of five homosexual business executives about the pink ceiling and what corporate executives can do to break it.

• rainbow ceiling