Prof. Kathleen AHRENS, Department of English and Communication

Breaking Through Glass Ceilings or Opening Glass Doors? Addressing the Challenges of Equality and Inclusion via Metaphors. 36^th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 36). Department of English and Applied Linguistics (DEAL), Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education (BAGCED), De La Salle University, College of Computing and Information Technologies (CCIT), National University and Lasallian Institute for Development and Education Research (LIDER), De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines, 20-22 October 2022.

Abstract
Women, but not men, are faced with metaphorical glass ceilings, and in some cases, glass cliffs. These novel constructed metaphors reflect the difficulties women have in advancing in their career, particularly in terms of advancement in leadership roles in politics and in the professions. However, what is less clear is if there are gendered associations for source domains associated with conventionalized conceptual metaphors. This talk will examine this issue and present recent advances in conceptual metaphor theory that use ontologies and collocational patterns to verify source domains (Ahrens & Jiang 2020) as a prior step to examining gendered associations. Drawing on data from business and politics, I will also explain how women use these conventionalized metaphors to position themselves as leaders. I will close my talk with a discussion of how we, as scholars, can influence the creation and interpretation of metaphor use so as to engender positive social change.