Abstract

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 diffi-culties than men in accessing managerial positions by an apparent etiology merely marked by gender.