However, as the writer TS Eliot once pointed out, metaphors also have their limitations: “It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert,” he wrote in 1860, “but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast.”

In other words, metaphors can help people understand novel and occasionally complex topics, but they are a simplification, offering only a specific angle or viewpoint that isn’t the full picture.

You can see similar limitations with the description of ‘glass ceilings’ in the workplace. Originally popularised by Gay Bryant at the height of the feminist movement in the 1980s, it’s a widely used term today that describes an invisible barrier that keeps women from occupying executive positions. The metaphor suggests that women should aspire to ‘break through’ the ceiling – but the problem is that it describes only the women reaching up, rather than, say, the men that are peering down from the top. This arguably places unfair responsibility on women to smash the ceiling, rather than focusing on the role of men in creating and maintaining it.

It also applies to the various other metaphors that have been proposed to describe women in the workplace. For example, for lower-paid workers, there is the ‘sticky floor’, which describes how women often feel stuck in low-wage jobs where career ascension is unlikely. Then there are ‘labyrinths’ for women to navigate, ‘firewalls’ to cross, and all sorts of variants on glass, from glass doors (a barrier to initial hiring) to glass walls (a barrier to horizontal transfer in a corporation).

“Women are the effect to be explained,” says Michelle Ryan, a psychology professor at the University of Exeter. “We never talk about men being overconfident, we always talk about women being underconfident. And we never talk about men having privilege or finding it easy; we always talk about women finding it difficult.”

Ryan believes that the metaphors we’re using to describe women at work reflect the world’s androcentricism – our insistence that, even in 2017, we consider the male experience as “the norm”.