A conversation with author Sophie Williams on bias that continues to holds women and other underrepresented groups back.
It’s been nearly two decades since the term “glass cliff” was coined; it refers to the tendency for women to break through the glass ceiling to top management roles only when there is a big crisis to overcome, which makes it more difficult for them to succeed. In short, senior female leaders are often set up to fail — and this continues to happen today, as recent examples from business, politics, and academia show.
SOPHIE WILLIAMS: It’s something that we see playing out time and time again in lots of countries around the world. So there’s research from the University of Utah looking at Fortune 500 companies. There’s research in the UK from University of Exeter looking at the FTSE 100 here. There’s research about how it impacts academia, how it impacts even coaches of sports teams.
ALISON BEARD: And we’ve referenced this, but is the glass cliff a phenomenon that affects only women or is it really any underrepresented group? ALISON BEARD: So let’s tease out some of the reasons why this still happens. Why are women and other underrepresented groups seen as people who might be able to step in when there’s a crisis and fix it?
ALISON BEARD: So that double-edged sword that you’re describing, you’re being asked to step into a more difficult situation. Then also given less time and support to manage it. Why does that play out? We see that people are less likely to believe in their ability for success from the beginning. Which means that what we see actually is team members disinvesting from what seems to them to be a risky leader, which means that women have a much harder time getting that social capital that they need in jobs, in order to be successful.
ALISON BEARD: You talk in the book about this hypervisibility when you’re the one example, and then also just this extra scrutiny. This idea that, “No, you need to do it faster, you need to do it better.” Why is that phenomena happening on this extra scrutiny? I’ve never been in a room, in a pitch meeting, in a discussion where eyes have turned to a single white man and they’ve said, “Well, what’s the white male perspective?” Because that is understood to be varied, right? That’s understood to be nuanced and personal. But when you are in a marginalized group, you lose that individuality.SOPHIE WILLIAMS: The first reason it matters is just the truth. When we have these stories of women coming into these really hard-to-win positions.
But if we looked at those female-led companies during that 10-year period up to 2023, we see that despite being a tiny minority, they had in fact outperformed the male-led businesses in that index. The researchers on that were very careful to say and to point out that not all of those businesses had had female CEOs for the entirety of that 10-year period.
So it’s really important that we don’t say the glass cliff means that women should never look at taking on even risky senior leadership roles. But instead what I want to do, is give them the tools needed to identify them. So the first thing that you should look for if you’re considering a role like this, is a moment of crisis. You should look for reputational scandals that are likely to be passed over to a new leader.
We see that women, as I said, are 14% less likely to be promoted year-on-year, even when they score highly for both performance and potential. It could be that you feel that your opportunities for leadership, your opportunities for progression are limited, and so you understand the risks of the glass cliff but decide to go for it anyway. I think it’s incredibly personal about what stage of your career you’re at, what opportunities you feel like you’re likely to be given going forwards or not.
So one thing that we can see that makes a significant difference for female and Black and global majority men, is the external system that they can bring in. So if I have a job or I have an offer that I have, and I just say to my community, to my external support system, “Okay, I’m going to give this a go, but there’s a really high chance of failure here. If that happens, I need your support to strategize, to make success.
I would say yes, absolutely, always, always bring these things to light. I would absolutely say the sooner, the better. If you can bring these things to light during the interview phase, then absolutely. I’d always say, get the protections that you can. Get them written down, make it so if they do decide to exit you before the agreed timeframe, they have to pay you, they have to buy you out of that contract.
She was able to really bring those soft skills that we see women being expected to have to the fore. She was able to take responsibility as a business for these issues. She was able to very publicly make changes, change staff and put in place public plans to not allow a disaster like this to happen again.
That leads to a situation that we’re in now, white men at the entry level represent about 30% of entry-level jobs. But by the time we look to the C-suite, that representation has ballooned up to somewhere between 65% and 68% representation, according to the Lean in Foundation and McKinsey. So what that means is we could say that white men are the only group who don’t experience the glass ceiling in their careers.
ALISON BEARD: And getting beyond tokenism, not saying, “Oh, well, we have one or two female board members. We had one female CEO in our history, so we don’t really need to do it again. We can go back to the white male leadership model.”
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Pac-12 Puts First Woman To Lead A Power 5 Conference On A Glass CliffI have taught women & gender studies at Oregon State University since 1996, including a course on gender, race & sports. Before this, I taught religious studies for 8 years at liberal arts colleges. I’ve served on OSU’s athletics committee and was the Faculty Athletics Representative at one of the liberal arts colleges.
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