English Heritage has announced that it has decided to list the glass ceiling, the transparent but rigid structure that blocked access for women to the nation’s boardrooms and corridors of power for most of the last millennium.
‘The glass ceiling has fallen into terrible disrepair,’ said English Heritage executive director Deborah Lamb. As recently as fifty years ago, the ceiling was thick enough to prevent women from working in the City and to keep all but half a dozen out of Parliament, she explained. ‘Unfortunately, a series of careless women including Germaine Greer, Margaret Thatcher and the Spice Girls are suspected of vandalising the ceiling, inflicting numerous cracks and chips and letting the draught in terribly.’
Only about four per cent of the original structure remains intact, mainly over the nation’s golf clubs and football pitches. ‘We thought it was time to preserve what’s left of the ceiling,’ Ms Lamb said. ‘Especially after a huge shard caved in just the other week over the Sky Sports studio and nearly sheared the knackers off a couple of male idiots. If we don’t act now a terrible accident could leave a passing chauvinist like Jeremy Clarkson lying wounded in a pool of blood – actually, maybe this isn’t so urgent after all.’