I was so pleased about the recent appointment of Charmaine Crooks as Canada Soccer’s interim president. Crooks is the first woman and the first person of colour to lead the organization. YES!!! GO WoC!!! BOOM. Things are changing. Why was I so mad the other day?!?!

Then I hit Twitter and started reading about glass cliffs… Dang…

We’ve all heard the term “glass ceiling”. It’s the “unofficially acknowledged barrier to advancement in a profession, especially affecting women and members of minorities.” (Oxford)

Not sure it’s so unofficial…

Maybe a little less common is the term “glass cliff” which refers to a situation in which women are promoted to higher positions during times of crisis or duress, when the chance of failure is more likely. Women in these situations are set up for failure.

A quick Wikipedia search revealed that the term was coined in 2004 by British professors Michelle K. Ryan and Alexander Haslam of University of Exeter, UK. Ryan and Haslam found that companies that appointed women to their boards were likelier than others to have experienced consistently bad performance in the preceding five months. This work eventually developed into the identification of a phenomenon known as the glass cliff — like the concept of a glass ceiling, but implying the inability to perceive the dangers of the cliff’s transparent edge.

So I asked myself: why do women end up on the “glass cliff”?

I asked Google, actually, and found this doozy of an article: How Women End Up on the “Glass Cliff” by Susanne Bruckmüller and Nyla R. Branscombe. (https://hbr.org/2011/01/how-women-end-up-on-the-glass-cliff)

Here is a synopsis:

After conducting two experiments, the authors believe the reason is a status quo bias. As long as a company headed by men performs well, there’s no perceived need to change its pattern of male leadership. Only if male leaders have maneuvered an organization into trouble is a switch to a female leader preferred.

…

They found that when a company is doing well, people prefer leaders with stereotypically male strengths, such as competitiveness and decisiveness, but when a company is in crisis, they think stereotypically female skills such as communication skills and the ability to encourage others are needed to turn things around.

…

“They concluded that a company’s leadership history and common assumptions about gender and leadership contribute to the glass cliff. Particularly striking was their finding that that the phenomenon does not seem to apply to organizations with a history of female leaders. 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 organizations that have good odds of continued success.”

Here are my questions:

What about those female leaders who are competitive and decisive? Or those men who communicate well and are encouraging? Can women be all these things? Can they not exhibit both stereotypically male AND female leadership qualities? Dare I say that, perhaps, there are women out there who can do it all? Who can lead with compassion and decisiveness? Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and New Zealand PM Jacinda Arden come to mind as incredible examples.