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When Carol Bartz was appointed CEO at Yahoo in January 2009, the company was struggling. Hired on a four-year contract, she put forth a plan to turn things around, but just two years and eight months in, she was fired over the phone without even getting to see her plan come to fruition. She was followed by Marissa Mayer, who was similarly handed a sinking ship.

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Mary Barra was moved up to chief executive in January 2014, just weeks before a major safety issue that led to multi-million-vehicle recall, launching her into grueling testimony in Congress over the automaker's safety record, with many suspecting it was a calculated promotion.

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Jill Soltau was appointed the first woman CEO of JC Penney in 2018 when the company had been drowning in debt and had already closed many stores. Then with the COVID-19 pandemic following soon after, the company filed for bankruptcy in May 2020, and Soltau was asked to step down from her role in December 2020.

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Elon Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal's advertising chief, will be the new CEO of Twitter (now called X Corp.). Musk tweeted that she will focus primarily on business operations, while he will continue to head product design and tech. To take the reins of a company that has lost more than half its value since his US$44 billion purchase and is struggling to earn a profit is risky to say the least, and has a likelihood of failure.

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Carly Fiorina was appointed CEO of Hewlett Packard in 1999 to be the leader who would take the company in a new direction after low performance. She pursued a controversial merger, for which board member Walter Hewlett filed legal action in order to sink, and she was subsequently fired. After she was removed, the board acknowledged that her merger would have been the right move. Fiorina famously claimed that "there is no glass ceiling," but seven years later reported that she was "surprised" that people paid more interest in her gender than her objectives.

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Ellen Pao inherited many problems when she was appointed interim chief executive of Reddit in 2014, reports The Guardian. She received insults, hate mail, and even death threats for starting an anti-harassment drive, which led to her resigning after just eight months. She wrote in her resignation that it was because the "board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining Reddit's core principles."

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Abramson was appointed to her position in 2011 when newspapers had begun failing and the publication was undergoing a difficult digital transition. Through her tenure she was criticized for her leadership style in quite gendered terms, like in the controversial 2013 Politico piece by Dylan Byers, which brought up her successor, Dean Baquet, slamming his hand against a wall and storming out of rooms. Abramson also found out she was paid less than her predecessor Bill Keller, and was fired after just three years.

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Margaret Thatcher is believed to be one of the rare success stories of glass cliff positions. Student radicalism was at its peak when she became education minister, and Britain was facing rampant unemployment and a recession when she became prime minister. She was always promoted when the position was precarious.

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A study called 'Above the glass ceiling: When are women and racial/ethnic minorities promoted to CEO?' analyzed CEO appointments at Fortune 500 companies over 15 years and found that women and people of color were more likely to be named CEO when the organization was struggling, Forbes reported.

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Despite these and more prominent examples, Forbes reported that some recent research has shown that white men are just as likely as women and minorities to be promoted to the helm of struggling companies. The only issue with studies like these is the difference between comparing women and minorities against men in terms of promotions versus against their own likelihood to receive promotions. Men are the norm for high-level promotions anyway, so it's obvious that their numbers will remain high even when considering glass cliff hires.

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Researchers failed to find a glass cliff among companies in the UK and Germany, and Michelle Ryan, now director of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, says the fact the glass cliff is not seen universally reinforces that it is dependent on many factors, typically involving the disparity between genders in each country. "Our research doesn't say that every woman faces the glass cliff, or that non-men occupy risky leadership positions – but rather that women are over-represented in glass cliff positions," she says.

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Beyond leading a company, the glass cliff theory extends even to sports teams and countries in crisis. For example, in US college basketball, minority coaches were found to be more likely than white men to be promoted to the helm of losing teams.

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The Guardian wrote in a 2014 piece called 'Women CEOs: Why companies in crisis hire minorities - and then fire them' that CEO tenure is typically shorter at companies that are struggling, compared to those that are stable. That means these companies can enjoy the benefit of saying they have had a woman CEO while also getting away with firing them soon after.

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Journalist Elizabeth Judge claimed in The Times in 2003 that women who had broken through the glass ceiling in British firms had "wreaked havoc on companies' performance and share prices," citing data suggesting that FTSE 100 companies with more women on their boards performed worse than those with only men.

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The second main category of explanations for the glass cliff falls under the umbrella of image. A company or political party may want to signal to the world that they're changing and to do so they might choose a new leader who is a marked change from their predecessor.

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British professors Michelle K. Ryan and Alexander Haslam of University of Exeter in the UK decided to look into the claim. In a study, Ryan and Haslam examined the performance of FTSE 100 companies before and after the appointment of new board members, to see whether the women or the drop in share price came first. Surprise, surprise—they found that companies who appointed women to their boards were already performing poorly in the preceding five months. They coined the term "glass cliff."

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The term "glass cliff" is obviously tied to the concept of the glass ceiling, which speaks to the false promise of elevation as seen through a clear ceiling, though elevation is actually unattainable. Glass cliff instead implies the inability to see the dangers of the cliff's transparent edge.

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Research has shown that many women and minorities take these precarious positions because it may be their “only chance” at the top seat. That said, we cannot overlook people's own agency in accepting these positions.

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Of course, there can be good and genuine motives to see people from underrepresented groups in leadership positions. Researchers in France and Switzerland found left-wing participants tended to choose minority candidates to run for political office in hard-to-win seats because they actually believe the candidate could bring about real change, BBC reports.

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In the best-case scenarios, glass cliff positions can provide a way for some leaders to prove themselves as not just adequate but even more skilled than whomever they replaced. On the other hand, the glass cliff is entrenched with intense stress, burnout, and the destruction of careers.

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Even going into a glass cliff position willingly doesn't save you from the "risk tax" that minorities must face. Beyond having to reach success while starting in a deficit, the stakes are also much higher: if you don't succeed, you may never get a second chance. And if you do, you'll likely have to keep proving yourself.

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Without knowledge of the glass cliff phenomenon, it's easy to see how the numbers could be argued to demonstrate that women and minorities tend to run companies into the ground. Just like Elizabeth Judge's 2003 claim showed, having women in glass cliff positions can reinforce harmful gender stereotypes.

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The first of the three possible explanations for a glass cliff is that those hiring a new CEO might believe that stereotypically female traits are helpful in a crisis. It's more optimistic, and some studies have been conducted to find that stereotypically female traits like being kind and considerate were preferred in relational crises.

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There is also the added pressure among women and minorities of feeling like you're not just representing yourself, but also others like you. For example, if a man is a bad CEO, he's viewed as a bad leader, whereas if a woman is a bad CEO, it's proof that all women are bad leaders.

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Alison Cook, a professor of management at Utah State University, interviewed 33 women and people of color in senior leadership roles across a range of industries in the US and found that nearly all of them took on precarious roles and assignments in order to prove themselves and build a career, some dubbing themselves "turnaround artists." Cook says, "They're good in these really tough situations, because they've had to be over and over and over."

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While gender equality is the condition that most needs to be addressed, there are some executive organizational policies that can make significant change. "If you have some form of quotas it is much harder to have these biased decision processes," offers Thekla Morgenroth of Purdue University in Indiana, who conducted a 2020 meta-analysis of glass cliff research using data from 74 existing studies. "That's a very practical thing that organizations can implement."

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The final explanation is the most unfortunate, which is that some decision-makers may indeed just be either consciously or unconsciously prejudiced against certain minorities and want to use them as a scapegoat.

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And then the other shoe drops. Cook's research showed that in the vast majority of cases, when a firm's performance declines under the leadership of an occupational minority CEO, they are replaced by a white man. Researchers call it the "savior effect," and it reaffirms the fear that a minority leader's failure can provoke a return to the white-male standard.

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While many still struggle to wrap their heads around the glass cliff, Michelle K. Ryan and Alex Haslam offered another perspective: the "glass cushion," which suggests that cushy leadership positions given disproportionately to men are instead the root of the problem. "Focusing on women's disadvantage may also lead us to ignore men's privilege and advantage," Ryan says.

Sources: (The Guardian) (Forbes) (BBC) (Vox) (MasterClass) (University of Exeter)

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We are, unfortunately, still living in a time where it's seen as a huge leap for diversity and representation when women are promoted to top-level positions. But what if beneath these great strides of progress there lies something more sinister, something major corporations and political parties were taking advantage of that might actually hurt women more in the long run?

Enter: the glass cliff phenomenon. It offers the theory that women and minorities are more likely to be promoted into leadership roles like executives or election candidates during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest. It remains a debate because it is naturally a very contentious subject, but much research has been done into how this affects women and minorities.

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