In 2003, The Times ran a piece arguing that corporate Britain would be better off without women on boards. It analysed FTSE 100 companies, found that those with the most women on their boards had performed worse, and drew the obvious conclusion.
Two researchers at the University of Exeter, Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam, weren’t convinced. They went back to the same dataset and looked again.
The correlation was real. The causation ran the other way.
Companies weren’t performing badly because they’d appointed women. They were appointing women because they were already performing badly — women were arriving on boards after a sustained decline in share price, taking on positions that were precarious before they got there.
Ryan and Haslam published that finding in 2005 and called it the glass cliff.
What it actually describes
The glass ceiling is the barrier to getting to the top. The glass cliff is what some women find when they arrive: a leadership position that is unusually likely to end badly, handed over at the point where failure is most probable.
It isn’t a conspiracy and it doesn’t require anyone to intend harm. It happens through ordinary decisions made under pressure — a board that wants visible change, a sense that something different is needed, a role that the safest internal candidates have quietly declined.
The evidence since
The original study looked at UK boards. The pattern has since been found repeatedly and in several settings.
Fortune 500 CEO appointments. Alison Cook and Christy Glass of Utah State University analysed fifteen years of CEO transitions and found that white women, and women and men of colour, were more likely than white men to be promoted to chief executive when firms were performing weakly.
Politics. A study of the 2005 UK general election found that within one party, men were selected to contest seats that were winnable, while women were disproportionately selected for seats that weren’t.
Not universally. Worth saying: some studies haven’t found the effect, particularly in CEO appointments specifically, where the number of women is small enough to make the statistics difficult. The board-level and multi-context evidence is stronger than the CEO-only evidence.
The trap that follows
The appointment is only the first half. Cook and Glass described what happens next, and it’s the part that does lasting damage.
If the crisis isn’t resolved quickly, the new leader gets blamed for a situation that predated her — and is frequently replaced by a white man, which is then read as a return to safe hands. The failure gets attributed to her rather than to the conditions she inherited.
They called the entry price a risk tax: to reach the top, white women and professionals of colour have to accept a significantly riskier proposition than their peers.
And there’s a documented example most people know. Sallie Krawcheck took over Merrill Lynch Wealth Management in 2009, during the fallout from the subprime crisis and a wave of adviser departures. She has said publicly that she was “re-orged out” shortly before her two-year anniversary, at a point when she believed the business was gaining ground.
Why women take them anyway
This is the question people ask, usually with a note of judgement in it.
Cook and Glass found the straightforward answer: women and underrepresented candidates accept these roles because they reasonably doubt a better offer is coming. If the stable, well-funded, low-risk leadership positions consistently go to someone else, then a difficult role is not one option among several. It’s the option.
Which reframes the whole thing. The glass cliff isn’t a failure of judgement by the women who step onto it. It’s a rational response to a narrower set of choices.
What to do if one is offered to you
Not “refuse it” — a turnaround you succeed at is career-defining, and plenty of people have built reputations on exactly that. But go in with your eyes open.
Diagnose before you accept. Is this a business with a fixable problem, or one in structural decline? Those look similar from outside and are completely different jobs. Ask for the actual numbers before you say yes, not after.
Ask who else was considered, and what happened. If two internal candidates passed on it, that’s the single most informative fact available and nobody volunteers it.
Get the mandate in writing. Not just targets — what authority you have, what you’re permitted to change, what resources come with it, and over what timeline you’ll be judged. Vague expectations are what you get measured against later, and they move.
Define success before you start, with the board. Agreed in advance and documented. This protects you and it also tells you something: if they can’t say what success looks like, they may not know, and you’ll be held to whatever they decide afterwards.
Price the risk into the offer. If it’s a risky role, say so and negotiate accordingly — compensation, yes, but also severance terms. Agreeing the exit when everyone is optimistic is far easier than agreeing it when they aren’t.
And get an outside read. Someone with no stake in your decision, who will tell you plainly what they see. This is exactly the situation peers are for — everyone inside the process has an interest in you saying yes.
Where the numbers are now
Some of this has improved. By 2024 there were 52 women running Fortune 500 companies — a record, and roughly 10% of the list. When this concept was first being written about, the figure was less than half that.
Better, and not remotely equal. And the count on its own doesn’t tell you whether the roles being handed over are the stable ones or the precarious ones, which is the whole point of the research.
The useful thing about knowing this exists isn’t fear. It’s that when a difficult opportunity arrives, you can evaluate it as a proposition rather than as a compliment — and ask the questions that a flattered person wouldn’t.
