At New York Telephone, Ms. Loden and a colleague, Wendy Fleder (now Wendy Tyler), initiated what was known at the time as sensitivity training, essentially consciousness-raising workshops, which were so successful that they spread throughout the Bell companies, Ms. Tyler said in a phone interview.
“Marilyn was smart, assertive and very passionate about what was really important,” Ms. Tyler continued. “She knew how to pick the right fights, but she also knew how to help people overcome what they needed to overcome. She helped people get rid of the noise in their heads.”
In recent years, Ms. Loden and Ms. Tyler had an interior design business in Naples, Fla. “Our careers weren’t easy,” Ms. Tyler said. “Marilyn felt the home was a safe space, and she wanted to help people with theirs.”
Ms. Loden wrote three books on gender and diversity in the workplace. In “Feminine Leadership: Or, How to Succeed in Business Without Being One of the Boys” (1985), she argued that the male leadership model — competitive, aggressive and focused on winning, no matter the cost — was hurting American corporations. She proposed that a philosophy of effective leadership draw from so-called female behaviors and traits, like intuition, empathy and cooperation, instead of treating them as impediments.
“Ms. Loden believes women should not strap on their tailored suits and briefcases and try to behave the way men do,” Marilyn Geewax wrote in a review in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Instead, they should stop apologizing for having a leadership style that tends to make the workplace more productive, lively and humane.”
While the zeitgeist may be the real mother of the glass ceiling, in 2019 one American institution credited Ms. Loden with the expression. On April 11 that year, “Jeopardy!” presented this answer in one of its Daily Doubles: “Management consultant Marilyn Loden says she coined this phrase for a barrier to female success in 1978.”
Stephanie Stein, an editor at HarperCollins, had the correct question (although she eventually lost to James Holzhauer, one of the show’s longest-running winners): “What is the glass ceiling?”
