Word.ws English Dictionary

bamboo ceilings

bamboo ceilings is the plural of bamboo ceiling.

Meaning of bamboo ceiling

Noun

bamboo ceiling (plural bamboo ceilings)

  1. (US, idiomatic) A social barrier to further promotion or progression, in employment and elsewhere, for a person of East Asian ethnicity.
    • The title Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling was selected because it acknowledges that Asian Americans do indeed face obstacles in the workplace and it asserts that there are cultural barriers that play a role in impeding career advancement.2005, Jane Hyun, Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling, Harper Business, →ISBN, page xx
  2. (idiomatic, East Asia) A social barrier to further promotion or progression, in employment and elsewhere, for women.
    • Nonetheless, women are definitely breaking through what has variously been called the glass ceiling, the bamboo ceiling, or the old boy's network.1995, Mahnaz Sarachi, "Women: Being and Becoming" in The Emergence of Women Into the 21st Century (P. Munhall and V. Fitzsimons, eds.), p. 9 (Google preview)

Questions about bamboo ceilings

What is bamboo ceilings the plural of?
Bamboo ceilings is the plural of bamboo ceiling.

Words near bamboo ceilings in the dictionary

  1. bamboo antshrike
  2. bamboo antshrikes
  3. bamboo baksheesh
  4. bamboo borer
  5. bamboo ceiling
  6. bamboo ceilings
  7. bamboo coral
  8. bamboo curtain
  9. bamboo diplomacy
  10. Bamboo English
  11. bamboo fern

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bamboo ceilings (page history and authors); bamboo ceiling (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bamboo ceilings.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bamboo_ceilings. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.