Crisis Management

How
“Glass Women
Cliff” End Up on the
by Susanne Bruckmüller
and Nyla R. Branscombe
From the Magazine (January–February 2011)

Listen to an interview with Susanne Bruckmüller.

15:44

By now everyone is familiar with the glass ceiling—the informal

barrier that keeps women out of upper management. In the past
few years, researchers have found that women have a better
chance of breaking through that ceiling when an organization is
facing a crisis—thus finding themselves on what Michelle Ryan
and Alex Haslam, of the University of Exeter, have termed the
“glass cliff.” But the question remains why.

To explore possible answers, we conducted two experiments. In

the first we asked 119 college students to read two newspaper
articles about an organic food company. The first article discussed
the upcoming retirement of the CEO. We created two versions of
the piece; in one the company was currently and historically
headed by men, and in the other it was headed by women. We also
created two versions of the second article, which dealt with the
company’s financial status, so that some students read about a
company that was growing, others about one that was closing
stores and laying people off. We then asked the students to choose
between two equally qualified candidates for CEO, one male and
one female.
When the company had been led by men and was doing well, 62%
of the students who read that scenario chose the male candidate.
But when the male-led company was in crisis, 69% chose the
female candidate. And when the company had been led by
women, there was no difference: The glass cliff disappeared.

Onto a Ledge
CEOs who’ve lived out this trend Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-
Packard, 1999–2005 Patricia Russo, Lucent and ...

One thing these results reveal, we believe, 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.

Our second experiment was designed to test our hypothesis that

attitudes about gender and leadership also help create the glass
cliff. We asked 122 students to read an article about a supermarket
chain that was either very successful or struggling badly. In both
cases the CEO was about to be replaced. The students read
descriptions of a male and a female candidate and rated each
one’s strength in 10 areas, some having to do with stereotypically
female attributes (such as communication skills and the ability to
encourage others), others with stereotypically male ones (such as
competitiveness and decisiveness). We then asked which
candidate they would choose as CEO. We found that when a
company is doing well, people prefer leaders with stereotypically
male strengths, but when a company is in crisis, they think
stereotypically female skills are needed to turn things around.
Accordingly, most participants (67%) chose the man to head the
successful company, while the majority (63%) thought the woman
should take over the company in crisis.
It appears, then, that a company’s leadership history and
common assumptions about gender and leadership contribute to
the glass cliff. We were especially struck by the finding 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.

ABusiness
version Review.
of this article appeared in the January–February 2011 issue of Harvard

SB
Susanne Bruckmüller is a research associate at the
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

NB
Nyla R. Branscombe is a professor of psychology
at the University of Kansas.