The "Glass Cliff," or Setting Women Up to Fail - Building Gender Balanced Business

As women are increasingly recruited to run businesses and sectors (eg Icelandic banks) that were nearly destroyed by men, it is time to look at the “glass cliff,” which is what some researchers call a tendency to promote women to positions of leadership only in situations so dire the women are very unlikely to succeed.

• Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam first published research on the glass cliff in 2005.

• Other researchers have questioned how frequently such doomed promotions occur.

• A variety of researchers, though, have found that women are likely to be promoted ahead of similarly qualified men only in situations with a high risk of organisational failure. Such research has been conducted in both the US and the UK.

• These high risk factors take the form not only of recent poor organisational performance but also of historical tendency to failure, widespread criticism of the group, and minimal levels of support or resources.

• Haslam and Ryan have also found that gender-based assumptions tend to reinforce such promotions, with men perceived as steady leaders (for normal times) and women as more communal and better-suited to crisis situations.

• With men tending to serve twice as long as CEOs in the US than women, tenure suggests that the glass cliff has cut short many promising women’s careers before they have had a reasonable chance to prove their worth and thus benefit fully their companies.

The British Journal of Management article