Most people know about the glass ceiling: the invisible barrier that keeps women from reaching top leadership positions. Researchers have also identified the glass cliff, where women are placed in leadership roles during times of crisis, and the glass escalator, where men in female-dominated fields get fast-tracked into management.
These concepts all assume careers move up. Increasingly, however, they do not. More people are building careers sideways — taking on extra gigs, branching into new skill areas or negotiating customized roles within their organizations. We call this lateral work.
As companies flatten their hierarchies and organize around project-based work, lateral moves have become the new career ladder. According to Statistics Canada, roughly 2.4 million Canadians — nearly nine per cent of the working-age population — engaged in some form of gig work in 2022.
