Women's labor has been "grafted into the clergy but has not taken root," Paula Nesbitt concludes in her book, Feminization of the Clergy in America. Women clergy who feel as though they are bumping their heads against a "stained glass ceiling" as they move through their careers will find some faint consolation in Nesbitt's book. They are not alone.

Nesbitt, a sociologist and professor at Cliff School of Theology in Colorado, bases her work on data from the Episcopal Church and from the Unitarian Universalist Association over a 70-year period. In both groups she notes that ordained women find it harder to reach higher level positions than do men, although there has been some progress for women since 1993. Women, she maintains, more often fill part-time, non-stipendiary, interim and lower-level jobs in the church than do men. There also has been some backlash as women have moved into the clergy job market. Some of that, she says, has been in the form of attacks on the legitimacy of ordination of women, tokenism, and the proliferation of multiple ordination tracks.

Nesbitt also sees the increases in the vocational diaconate, growth in Canon 9 ordinations to the local priesthood and diaconate and even the emphasis on the ministry of the laity as factors that have marginalized ordained women. Nesbitt's book is a thorough and well-documented study, an eye-opening and sobering glimpse into the realities of clergy deployment. It is a "must read" for deployment officers and others who want to know more about a complex kind of social change as women continue to move into new roles in the church.

(The Rev. Canon) Kristi Philip Spokane, Wash.