article from http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/

Recommendations for business include:

• The CEO must communicate visible and continuing commitment to workforce diversity. This in turn can influence the culture of the organization by creating an atmosphere that fully utilizes the talents and capabilities of a diverse workforce .
• Efforts to achieve workforce diversity should be an integral part of corporate strategic business plans. Competitive employers measure and monitor key business areas such as profits, capital investment, productivity, market share, and quality. Setting goals and timetables for work force diversity is an extension of this business practice which helps organizations measure their progress and growth. Additionally, line managers must be held accountable for progress toward breaking the glass ceiling. That may mean tying their pay and rewards system to accomplishments of diversity objectives.
• Businesses should use affirmative action as a tool to help ensure that all qualified individuals have equal access and opportunity to compete based on ability and merit. Affirmative action is the deliberate undertaking of positive steps to design and implement procedures that ensures the employment system provides equal opportunity to all. Properly implemented, affirmative action does not mean quotas, allowing preferential treatment or employing or promoting unqualified people. It means opening the system and casting a wide net to recruit, train, and hire people who may not look like what corporate executives have traditionally looked like; who may not think like corporate executives have traditionally thought.
  It means promoting opportunities for advancement for people who can contribute effectively to a corporation and, consequently, the nation's economic stability. It means making full use of the rich talent this nation has to offer.
• Business must expand their traditional executive recruitment networks and seek out candidates with non-customary backgrounds and experiences. They must go beyond the old school network and seek talent both inside and outside the corporation, by looking to employee sponsored networks and affinity groups, or at women's colleges, or universities with historical ties to ethnic groups.
• Business must train the entire workforce in the strengths of ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. Educating your employees means creating a workplace that is welcoming and open to all. Diversity training debunks myths about the suitability and capability of women and minorities for executive careers.
• Companies must act now to prime the pipeline by: identifying objective performance, skill and knowledge criteria for advancement; instituting formal succession planning; and providing rotational and non-traditional job assignments that broaden the base of a candidate's experience and visibility. Mentor and be mentored. Many successful business persons have identified mentoring as a critical factor in their career advancement due to its function as a means of networking, socializing and forming ties with influential corporate leaders.
• Work/life and family friendly policies should be adopted. These include flexible hours, daycare and elder care programs, telecommuting, and job sharing. Family friendly policies improve productivity and reduce costs by relieving workers of non-job related worries and allows them to focus on business objectives.
• Companies must implement high performance workplace practices that include employee participation, innovative compensation policies, employment security, information sharing, and continuous learning. There is strong evidence that doing right by employees is also good for the bottom line. Companies with well respected employee practices that invest in their workers see a positive impact on measures of long-term corporate performance such as utilization of capital and total returns to investors. One study found companies that introduced formal training programs experienced a 19 percent larger rise in productivity than firms which did not train their workers.
  Government has a role to play in breaking glass ceilings. Government must lead by example and make equal access and opportunity a reality for all. It can not mandate and require private sector to pursue and value diversity, if it is unwilling to do the same.
  Enforcement agencies must increase their efforts to enforce existing antidiscrimination laws, such as Equal Pay Act of 1963, ADA, and FAML, strengthen interagency coordination, and update regulations and policies to keep up with the changing workplace environment.
  Improved data collection can give a clearer picture of the progress women and minorities are making by pinpointing areas where improvement is needed, and increased disclosure of diversity data is an incentive to develop and maintain innovative, effective programs to break glass ceiling barriers, while beginning a process of positive social change through corporate employment policies. Doing right is consistent with doing well.
  Additionally, government - federal, state and local - must ensure adequate resources in funding and personnel, which are essential for enforcement agencies to fulfill their legislative mandates.
  
  Glass ceilings in the business world are not an isolated feature of corporate architecture; rather they are held in place by the attitudes of society at large. While the Commission recognized that attitudinal changes cannot be dictated, mandated, or legislated, it did put forward initiatives that address the difference barrier and can reduce stereotypical thinking, prejudice, and bias which can be absorbed and become the beliefs upon which we act.