Lydia Dishman* says once the glass ceiling is shattered, there’s no guarantee that a female leader won’t step or be pushed off the glass cliff.
Image: eelnosiva
The glass ceiling is notoriously hard for women in leadership to shatter, but there’s another phenomenon that the few women who do break the glass ceiling face: the sharp precipice known as the glass cliff.
The term was coined in 2005 by Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter whose research showed that, during a period of overall stock‐market decline, women were appointed to boards more consistently when those organisations experienced bad performance in the preceding five months.
“These results expose an additional, largely invisible, hurdle that women need to overcome in the workplace,” they write.
In other words, women can rise to leadership, but when they’re brought in to turn things around during dire times, they have to bear the blame if things don’t go well.
So, while they’ve managed to break through the glass ceiling, they’re then pushed off the glass cliff.
Another study took this idea a step further.
Researchers Alison Cooke and Christy Glass of Utah State University analysed all CEO transitions in Fortune 500 companies over a 15‐year period with an eye toward the leadership tenure of women and racial and ethnic minority CEOs.
“Consistent with the theory of the glass cliff, we find that occupational minorities — defined as white women and men and women of colour — are more likely than white men to be promoted to CEO of weakly performing firms,” they write.
The mind-set
The psychology of what predicates the positioning of women leaders in times of crisis is complex, but ultimately not too challenging to understand.
According to another study, crisis management is nearly always tied to changing the entire way leadership is operating.
If a man was previously in the role, the most radical shift would be to install a woman chief to lead the organisation in crisis away from the traditional way it’s been managed previously.
This visible break not only signals a new way forward but also plays into gender stereotypes.
The idea of a “female advantage” in these situations comes from research that found women self-report a different type of decision-making than their male counterparts.
Women say they’re more democratic, participative, and consensus seeking, traits that are more associated with managing through change.
Men, on the other hand, are associated with stability.
This more closely ties women with leading during times of crisis.
This bias runs deep.
Indeed, another academic study asked participants to select a male or female leader with identical qualifications.
When the organisation was doing well, 67 per cent chose the man, and in times of crisis, 63 per cent elected to have the woman lead.
The glass cliff scenario is furthered when the organisation in crisis needs a leader with people management skills but doesn’t require someone to be a particularly aggressive decision-maker.
This passiveness and lack of agency reinforces gender stereotypes and sets the female leader up for a high-risk situation because her hands are tied and she’s not able to actively improve the organisation’s situation.
The real-world scenarios
Women have fallen off the glass cliff in a wide variety of sectors, including politics.
Two separate reports from European academic researchers reveal that this most often happens in right-wing parties.
The studies of general election results in the UK and France found that each country’s conservative party tended to support female and minority candidates when conditions weren’t favourable for them to succeed.
On the more progressive side, this didn’t happen.
The implication is that conservatives are deliberately choosing to put women and minorities in these no-win situations to have them fail and support the status quo of white men in power.
In the corporate world, there is a cadre of commanding women who’ve taken the CEO reins, only to fall (or be pushed) off the glass cliff.
Carly Fiorina, then at Hewlett-Packard, and Pat Russo of Lucent (later Alcatel-Lucent), are two of the more recognisable names.
Watching and waiting
Thought leaders are standing by to see if the likes of British Prime Minister, Theresa May or GM’s Mary Barra might be the next to take the tumble.
May became Prime Minister to take up the unenviable task of leading her constituents through the troubled waters following Brexit and the resignation of her predecessor, David Cameron.
As Michelle Ryan, one of the researchers who originated the term glass cliff, put it, “Whose reputation is going to be permanently tied in the country’s collective memory?”
“[Cameron is] exiting off stage pretty quickly.”
“He may have caused it, but she has to fix it.”
A 2013 PwC report found that although the number of women CEOs at large organisations is growing, more women leaders are forced out of the office than men.
A bright spot
However, not all women fall off that proverbial cliff.
There are some women who’ve risen to the top spot as well as to the occasion of leading a turnaround.
Most notable is Phebe Novakovic of General Dynamic, who took over in 2013 when the aerospace industry was hit with the one-two punch of declining private sales and lower military spending.
Since then, she’s boosted operating profit margins, which pushed the stock up to nearly twice what it was when she took the position.
As it neared bankruptcy, Xerox’s board appointed Anne Mulcahy as CEO, who turned the company around.
The solution
Susanne Bruckmüller, a Research Associate at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Nyla R. Branscombe, Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas, found that Mulcahy’s example is one that suggests the glass cliff can be eliminated.
“We were especially struck by the finding that the phenomenon does not seem to apply to organisations with a history of female leaders,” they write in Harvard Business Review.
“This suggests that as people become more used to seeing women at the highest levels of management, female leaders won’t be selected primarily for risky turnarounds — and will get more chances to run organisations that have good odds of continued success.”
* Lydia Dishman writes about the intersection of tech, leadership, and innovation and is a regular contributor to Fast Company.
This article first appeared at www.fastcompany.com.
