Just under a year ago I wrote an issue talking about the glass cliff, the phenomenon where women are appointed to leadership roles in times of crisis, setting them up for failure. (This also happens to people of color to an even greater degree.) Women tend to take these types of positions because it’s difficult for them to ascend to leadership positions during less turbulent times. In the long run, of course, taking these types of jobs can hurt women’s careers when they are blamed for the inevitable failures everyone saw coming.

The glass cliff certainly exhibits itself in the legal profession. Women are assigned cases or matters known to be difficult or high-risk—and are given fewer resources to resolve them because of their lower desirability. Then those same women get labeled as less successful than male counterparts who receive the plum case assignments that were never as difficult to begin with.

Giving women “glass cliff” assignments goes beyond mere pettiness or office politics: it can have profound financial and career implications for the women who experience it. After all, as you may have observed, just as it really only takes one significant victory to make a career, if you are never given those opportunities, your career might never take off in the first place.

Despite how much the glass cliff has been discussed in recent years, a new study purports to cast doubt on the belief that the glass cliff disproportionately affects women. In this week’s issue of Comes Now, we take a look at that study to see if it suggests that we should stop using the term “glass cliff.”

The Study

A new study by researchers at Villanova University published in The Leadership Quarterly analyzed CEO appointments in all publicly-held U.S. companies listed on major exchanges from 1998 to 2022, which amounted to data on 10,348 CEOs, including 526 women (5%). Thus, compared to previous research, the analysis was over a significantly larger period of time, included a broader range of firm sizes, and focused on CEO appointments exclusively rather than also including board appointments and high-level managers.

To measure whether a given firm was in a precarious position at the time of the appointment of a female CEO, the researchers looked at financial statement variables such as return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), as well as firm-level risk and solvency measures such as leverage and probability of default. They also used data to calculate a firm’s sales growth numbers at the time a new CEO was appointed.

Importantly, to ensure the reliability of the regression model they used, the researchers also controlled for gender diversity and industry. They controlled for gender diversity because previous literature had shown, unsurprisingly, that more diverse boards tend to appoint more female CEOs. They controlled for industry because the representation of female CEOs varies substantially across industries.

The researchers found that women are no more likely than men to be appointed CEOs at struggling companies. In fact, they found that as a company's financial stability improves, the likelihood of a woman being appointed CEO increases. In short, these researchers concluded that, while we may notice when female CEOs are placed in a position doomed to fail, the data does not support that this routinely occurs.

The authors made clear that women remain dramatically underrepresented at the CEO level and did not view any aspect of their study to refute those facts. Indeed, they saw their results as helping to make the case that more women should be at the top of companies. In their view, perpetuating the idea that women are more likely to be set up for failure reinforces negative stereotypes about women’s leadership abilities by implying that women are only given opportunities when the odds are stacked against them. In addition, the researchers observed, if women believe they are likely to be placed on a glass cliff, they may hesitate to pursue leadership positions at all.

Concluding Thoughts

To be clear, this was not the first study that cast doubt on the phenomenon of the glass cliff. Since the concept was introduced in 2005, researchers have been debating the extent to which it exists. And I’m all-for doing more research so that we can begin to understand where discrimination does—and doesn’t—exist.

Whatever the value of this study’s conclusions, for several reasons I don’t think this study will be the end of our discussions about the glass cliff.

First, and most importantly, the image of the glass cliff allows us to talk about something that undoubtedly occurs in some workplaces. It gives us a vocabulary to navigate our feelings—so if you’re concerned that the nature of how work is assigned or distributed in your office isn’t giving you a chance to shine, you can explain why that matters and how it may hurt women, people of color, and other disadvantaged people.

The vocabulary also gives us a way to measure risk in leadership opportunities we’re presented. After all, there are many reasons you might want or feel like you need to take a “glass cliff” position. Maybe you need a challenge. You might have a unique skillset you can showcase in a position where that is needed. Or you might get the chance to be promoted faster than you otherwise would. It’s perfectly fine to analyze costs and benefits in this way, and to choose to walk into a less-than-desirable situation with your eyes wide open.

The findings of this study won’t and shouldn’t end those types of discussions because, even though in some ways this study was the broadest one done to-date, it was also the narrowest. While focusing on female CEOs may contribute to the vigor of the analysis by removing the “noise” of other job titles, in other ways focusing on CEOs provides an unnecessarily narrow view. By looking only at female CEOs you’re by definition analyzing the extraordinary few who made it to the very top rather than looking at the many other women in senior positions just below CEO where you might be more likely to see the glass cliff phenomenon persist. Similarly, although the researchers went out of their way to look comprehensively at many measures of financial health, the glass cliff doesn’t just occur when women are appointed to companies that are in financial difficulties. There can be many aspects about an assignment that are perilous beyond what’s happening to the company’s stock price. That’s certainly true of glass cliff assignments in the legal profession: an assignment may be perilous because a case is assigned to a difficult judge or has an impossible-to-please client.

Finally, as the authors concede, there are precious few female CEOs. You could easily make the case that the researchers had to use a dataset that included so many companies for such a long period of time because if you just looked at female CEOs in the Fortune 500 right now you wouldn’t have much to analyze. Looking at 526 women over a period of nearly twenty-five years doesn’t seem to provide all the answers.

In short, I hope you won’t allow the headlines about this study prevent you from thinking about these issues in a way that the glass cliff imagery allows us to do so. Conversely, the study also reminds us that we shouldn’t assume all women who assume leadership positions in challenging circumstances are facing a glass cliff.

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