For as long as I can remember I’ve been warned about the glass ceiling, the invisible but seemingly impossible-to-break-through barrier that sits above the heads of women in business,  stalling their careers and stopping them not only from scaling to the highest possible peaks of leadership, but the limits of their personal potential.

Growing up as a girl in the 90s, fed on a diet of Spice Girls-branded ‘girl power’, I was used to being told that anything was possible for girls like me – a message that I found difficult to balance alongside the limiting force of the glass ceiling I’d heard so much about.

This is until I learned about ‘the glass cliff’ – the lesser-known sister to the glass ceiling.

The glass cliff phenomenon was first noted in 2003 when Exeter University researchers Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, frustrated by what they felt were a series of inaccurate reports associating female leadership with poor business performance, started to dig into the real data around leadership appointments in FTSE 100 companies. Their research, rather than reinforcing the idea of women being responsible for poor business performance, found the suggestion to be wildly misleading, especially when considered in the context of how the businesses had been performing before women stepped into their boardrooms. They quickly learned that those businesses that appointed female, or racially marginalised male, leaders, were more likely than not to have already been in a consistent period of poor performance before the appointment.

They found that the poor performances attributed to female leaders could have had any number of roots – from a reputational scandal in which the tarnish was likely to be passed on to the new leader, to a hit to stock market valuation or profitability that preceded their tenure. But whatever the specifics were, those businesses that deviated from the tried and tested white male leadership were all in some moment of crisis, before bringing in a female leader.

This is the glass cliff – the invisible, but incredibly dangerous, challenges that women face as they step into the most senior leadership roles. It’s a story of structural inequality disguised as personal failure.

Of course, there are men who take on hugely challenging professional leadership positions, just as there are women who take on challenging roles and come out on top. There are also women who take on leadership challenges that they are just not suited for or prepared to meet, just as we sometimes see the appointment of mediocre men. The glass cliff doesn’t doom all women with leadership ambitions; instead, it simply shows us the circumstances in which different leaders are most likely to have opportunities open up to them.

When we stop to think about it, many of us will realise that although we might not have had the words to frame it up to now, we are all familiar with the glass cliff, and we’ve seen it play out for women in leadership under all kinds of circumstances.

Theresa May stepped in to negotiate and lead a Brexit deal for a referendum she didn’t call for and wasn’t in favour of – the men who had led the country to that point were suddenly nowhere to be found – before she was pushed out and replaced by a white male to get a broadly similar deal over the line.

Marissa Mayer had a short-lived stint as the CEO of Yahoo after the business struggled to find its place in the big tech landscape; Dame Sharon White has had less time as the head of John Lewis and Partners than either of the CEOs before her. Helena Helmersson was forced out of her position as the CEO of the H&M Group at the end of January this year, having taken on the role in January of 2020, just before the global pandemic struck, and we are all waiting to see what the future will hold for Linda Yaccarino, who stepped into the top role at X (formerly Twitter) last year after the business suffered a huge loss of advertisers and a massive blow to its reputation, having been acquired by Elon Musk a year prior.

We’re all familiar with women coming into senior roles when the odds are stacked very firmly against their success from the beginning, and we’ve become used to blaming them for the difficulties they face as they try to turn the tides of struggling enterprises. Even lauded leaders, such as Aviva’s chief executive Amanda Blanc, have been faced with having to overcome these challenging circumstances. Blanc, like Helmersson, stepped into her role during the global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic – a difficult set of circumstances for any new leadership appointment. Despite the business performing well under her, with Aviva’s market capitalisation being about a third higher than when she joined, she still faced ‘sexist’ and ‘derogatory’ comments during the company’s 2023 AGM, with one shareholder suggesting that “she’s not the man for the job”, another questioning whether or not Blanc should be “wearing trousers”, and a third taking a swipe at board-level women overall, reportedly saying: “They are so good at basic housekeeping activities; I’m sure this will be reflected in the direction of the board in future.”

Which raises the question: why is this happening? Why would a business that is facing a crisis be more likely to turn to a female leader for the first time? And why are women being left in charge of failing, and potentially damaging their reputations along the way as they try to rescue businesses from problems they didn’t create?

One interpretation is that when a business is going through a moment of hardship, the skillsets it values undergo a significant shift. While in most circumstances the mantra of ‘think manager, think male’ still holds true – when we are asked to conjure up the image of a leader in our minds, many of us by default will imagine a white male – it seems that when a business is struggling, the adage is replaced by ‘think crisis, think female’.

Women are perceived as holding an abundance of ‘soft skills’, and they are expected to be kind and nurturing – values that businesses may not put a premium on in times of success but may view as increasingly important during times of difficulty. This bias towards looking to women for leadership was especially true, the researchers found, when “the manager was required, or expected, to simply stay in the background and endure the crisis, or become a scapegoat for poor company performance”, which led them to note that that “these findings are consistent with suggestions that women who are selected for glass cliff positions may be getting set up to fail”. It seems that in times of crisis, we look to women to soothe and reassure employees, boosting spirits and morale, rather than looking to them to make transformational business change.

It could be argued, then, that women are appointed during these times of hardship because businesses view them as more disposable and more expendable. Women are also at risk of the novelty factor. If a business has only had male leaders up until now but has found itself in a moment of crisis, it could do worse than to try a new leader who is, at least visibly, not like anyone they have given the opportunity to before. This signals not just to employees, but to shareholders and investors, that a business is exploring all avenues, and bringing in some much-needed diversity of thought to find new ways of working and forge a path ahead.

When we add all of this to the facts that female CEOs are much more likely than their male counterparts to be parachuted into leadership roles as external hires (22% v 35% respectively), and so need to learn their way around the business at the same time as executing transformational change, it’s no wonder that women are still perceived as being a riskier bet for CEO succession planning – despite the reasons for these disparities not being linked to performance or aptitude.

One outcome of these risky, high-profile appointments that women are disproportionately favoured for is the impact that they have on female leaders’ ability to get on with the job of leading. 

When women are brought into these positions, there is often a feeling of hypervisibility and a fear that they are expected to represent not just themselves, but all potential leaders like them. Being still so underrepresented in leadership, individual female leaders are often held up as totems of all of womankind’s ability, or lack of ability, to be successful in leadership roles. This causes many to second guess themselves or act more cautiously than they otherwise would for fear of not only falling off their own glass cliff, and thus making leadership opportunities harder to come by for future women should they be unsuccessful in their roles.

The glass cliff means that not only are we handing women poisoned chalices when it comes to leadership opportunities, but we’re also limiting their abilities, once in place, to lead effectively – which only reinforces our perceptions of women being bad for business, despite that having been disproven.

The Glass Cliff: Why Women In Power Are Undermined – And How To Fight Back by Sophie Williams is out now (Macmillan Business, £20)

Sophie Williams is an ex-global leader at Netflix and has held the titles of COO and CFO in London advertising agencies. She is a TED Speaker (The Glass Cliff – Why Some Leaders Aren’t Set Up For Success, 1.5 million+ views) and the voice of Instagram’s @OfficialMillennialBlack.

The Glass Cliff (2024) is her third book. Also by Sophie Williams: Anti-Racist Ally (2020), and Millennial Black (2021)

Images: Getty