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Last weekend, I spent a good hour reading about the five Tory politicians nominated to replace their troubled leader, Rishi Sunak.
The front runners vary, depending on whether you're looking at a betting agency like Ladbrokes, or a favorite of veteran Westminster political commentators.
But there are three names that still stand out: Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, and Suella Braverman.
They're all women, which raises a question I haven't thought about in a long time. Nearly 20 years after the so-called glass cliff was first discovered, is the problem as bad as ever? There are signs that this is happening, which says a lot about one of the most exasperating and intriguing theories in modern corporate life.
The glass cliff describes the way in which women are perceived as more likely to break through the glass ceiling and rise to a senior job when things are tough, the risk of failure is high and men are less interested in the job. Premiere: Managing a divided, divided and unpopular Conservative Party in the UK.
But the term originally emerged from the business world, in a way that is useful to any financial journalist.
In 2003, The Times of London published a report on the front of its business section that questioned the wisdom of appointing women to boards. She said the share prices of major British companies “that refrained from embracing political correctness by appointing women to boards” performed better than “those that actively promote gender equality at the top”.
This article prompted two sociologists at the University of Exeter, Michael Ryan and Alexander Haslam, to take a closer look at the data.
Their 2005 study told a different story: Women tended to be hired at companies that were already performing poorly, leaving the new leader teetering on what the researchers called the glass cliff.
Other academics have explored the abyss in politics and law. Some have found that it also applies to CEOs of racial and ethnic minorities.
But in 2024, surely there must be signs that the problem is fading? Not according to Ryan and Haslam.
“We recently completed an analysis of all the studies on the glass cliff, and there is no evidence that the phenomenon is slowing down,” Ryan told me last week. “In fact we can see a number of notable examples of glass cliff designations at the moment.”
She has a point. When Linda Yaccarino was named CEO of To take the job.” .
And in Australia, Vanessa Hudson recently became the first female CEO of Qantas, as the airline has endured a series of controversies.
In the UK, women have been appointed to a series of senior jobs in the debt-laden water sector, facing harsh criticism over sewage leaks and high fees.
However, the UK also shows that the glass cliff need not equate to career death. When Kate Swan became WHSmith group chief executive in 2003, the retailer was seen as an underperforming business surrounded by dangerous rivals.
Swan was quickly praised as a “transformation artist” who brought the company's performance to life. She stayed there for a decade, then went on to run SSP, the food retailer, where the share price in 2018 fell 7 percent after it revealed its plans to step down.
Swann's story underscores a major theme in The Glass Cliff, a new book that examines how to address the problem.
Its author, former Netflix exec Sophie Williams, says women who run tough companies need enough time at work to do what's needed — which they often don't get. In fact, recent figures show that female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies stay on average for 4.5 years compared to 7.2 years for men, a gap that has barely narrowed since 2014.
All of this sheds a worrying light on some good news that emerged last week. Women now hold a record 42 per cent of board seats at the UK's largest listed companies, the government-backed FTSE Women Leaders Review reported.
This suggests that the glass cliff problem may have subsided, to some extent, says the review's chief executive, Dennis Wilson. She told me that women leaders are still subject to a level of “excessive scrutiny” that men rarely face. “So you end up with the same kind of problem as the glass abyss.”
Happy International Women's Day.
pilita.clark@ft.com
