Dear friend of CIFAR,

The White Cliffs of Dover. The Niagara Escarpment. The sheer canyons of Yosemite National Park. Impressive precipices all, but none is so daunting as the Glass Cliff. Though the Glass Cliff is a metaphorical formation, it has very significant consequences for women who dare scale the heights of power. When women break through the glass ceiling, becoming presidents, CEO’s or taking on other leadership roles, these tend to be in organizations that are experiencing severe difficulty. As a result, ground beneath them is more likely to crumble, sending them plummeting – over the Glass Cliff. This has led to a widespread and dangerous misperception that women leaders cause poor performance, when in fact, our research suggests it is the other way around.

If it were true that poor company performance could be directly attributed to women being given top jobs, it would seem to undermine the case of those who lobby for women to be given leadership roles on grounds that their diverse strengths can benefit the companies that employ them.

However, our research, published in the British Journal of Management, Academy of Management Review, and Leadership Quarterly, indicates that such pessimism may be unfounded. Rather than women leaders causing poor company performance, poor company performance may lead to the appointment of women to positions of leadership.

In one of our studies, we conducted an extensive investigation of the performance of FTSE 100 companies, before and after the appointment of a male or female board member. This analysis revealed a surprising and complex story.

The appointment of a woman director was not associated with a subsequent drop in company performance. Indeed, in a time of a general financial downturn, companies that appointed a woman actually experienced a marked increase in share price after the appointment.

But more interesting were the fluctuations in company performance leading up to the appointment of women to boards of directors. In a time of a general financial downturn, companies that appointed a woman to their board had experienced consistently poorer performance in the five months preceding the appointment than those who appointed only men.

It therefore appears that after having broken through a glass ceiling women are actually more likely than men to find themselves on a glass cliff, meaning their positions of leadership are risky or precarious.

Our research found similar results in politics, where women are asked to run in less winnable seats or given riskier cabinet positions, and in law, where women are assigned to more risky legal cases than are men.

Now we are continuing our research by studying the social and psychological processes that contribute to glass cliffs and the long-term implications of placing women in precarious leadership positions.

Best wishes from the frontiers of human knowledge.

Alexander Haslam

Fellow, Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being program
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

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