This article defends the thesis according to which understanding career norms and "production" of managers sheds a new light on the persistence of a glass ceiling in organizations. We show that discriminations which women experience in the company under study are embedded in organizational processes. They are part of the male career model in the shape of a spiral as well as the formal career management system. They are also due to informal selection and detection practices (network impact and plays of influence), role expectations and representations attached to the "manager" figure, which is at the center of competency evaluation tools. Contextualizing women’s careers’ curb helps to understand where to find the major resistance points to the feminization process of top management in a favorable institutional context (professional equality agreement, diversity enhancement policy).