The Glass Cliff: Why Women Get the Leadership Role When Everything Is Already on Fire

The Glass Cliff: Why Women Get the Leadership Role When Everything Is Already on Fire

You were the one they called when things got difficult. The role had been sitting empty for months, or the person before you had just left under circumstances nobody wanted to explain. Suddenly you were the obvious choice. It felt like recognition. You said yes. Then you spent the next eighteen months trying to lead from inside a burning building that everyone else had quietly evacuated.

This is not a coincidence. It has a name. And it has been studied for over two decades.

The glass cliff is one of the most consequential patterns in women’s leadership. It affects women across industries, across pay grades, and most sharply, across race. Yet it barely appears in the leadership conversations most women are invited into. The structural reckoning is happening in academic journals and mainstream headlines. It is almost entirely absent from the spaces where glass cliff women leaders actually need to hear it.

 

What the Glass Cliff Actually Means

The glass cliff was first documented by Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam at the University of Exeter in 2005. Their finding was counterintuitive enough that it took years to gain serious traction: women are more likely to be appointed to senior leadership positions during periods of organizational crisis or decline. Not despite the instability. Because of it.

You already know about the glass ceiling. The invisible barrier that keeps women, particularly women of colour, from reaching senior leadership in the first place. The glass cliff describes what happens after the ceiling is cracked: the role you are handed already carries a high risk of failure. The company is bleeding money. The team is fractured. The crisis is months in motion. And when it does not resolve, you are the one left holding it.

The name is deliberately jarring. You should feel the edge.

“She is handed authority and accountability at the same time. She is rarely handed the conditions needed to succeed.”

 

Why Women of Colour Are Appointed to Crisis Roles at Higher Rates

Part of this is about optics. A diversified leadership team signals change. And change is exactly what organizations want to project during a crisis, to shareholders, to staff, to the public. Appointing a woman, especially a woman of colour, becomes a visible statement of transformation. What it rarely is: a genuine transfer of power, adequate resources, or real structural support.

The woman brought in to turn things around frequently inherits decisions she had no part in making. She takes on timelines she cannot control, navigates boards and colleagues who helped create the problem she is now expected to solve, and is handed authority and accountability at the same time. She is rarely handed the conditions needed to succeed.

Research consistently shows women of colour are appointed to glass cliff positions at higher rates than white women. They are also blamed more quickly when the crisis persists.

The optics that justified the appointment become the alibi for the outcome.

 

What You Felt That You Did Not Name

Here is the part that gets left out of most leadership conversations. The women in these roles often knew something was off before they accepted. They could feel it. The role had been vacant too long. The framing in the interview was strange. The urgency in the invitation felt less like confidence and more like desperation.

But they pushed the feeling down. Being asked felt like what they had been working towards. Saying yes to hard things had always been how they proved themselves. The opportunity had a shape that looked exactly like the recognition they had earned.

And then, when the role ended badly, or when it hollowed them out in ways they could not fully explain to people on the outside, they turned the explanation inward. They catalogued their decisions, looked for what they had done wrong. They made the outcome about their capability.

That is what the glass cliff does that nobody names. It is not only a professional hazard. It becomes a personal verdict.

I have worked with women who left these positions questioning their own readiness to lead at all. Women with extraordinary track records. Women who had navigated genuinely hard things before and come through. What they had actually encountered was a system that positioned them to fail and then removed itself from the story.

“It is not only a professional hazard. It becomes a personal verdict.”

 

Questions to Ask Before You Accept a High-Stakes Leadership Role

None of this means do not take the role. It means take it with your eyes fully open. These are questions worth getting real answers to before you say yes.

Why is this role available right now, and what happened to the person before you?

What is the actual state of the organization, not the version you have been presented in the interview?

What authority are you being given, and does it match the accountability you are being handed?

Who will you report to, and have they genuinely invested in turning this around, or are they managing an optics problem?

What budget, team capacity, and time do you have, and are those resources realistic for what is being asked?

If the answers feel evasive, pay attention. If you are being pressed to decide quickly, that pressure is information.

A role that is right for you will not evaporate if you ask for two more days to think.

 

What to Do If You Are Already in It

If you are already in a role that feels like this, you inherited the crisis rather than created it, the bar keeps shifting, the performance narrative being written about you feels disconnected from the reality you are living inside, start documenting now.

Track decisions, timelines, resources you requested and were denied, and the state of things when you first arrived. Not because you are preparing to fail. Women in glass cliff positions are frequently erased from the institutional record after the fact. Do not let that record be written without your account of it.

Find people outside your organization who can reflect back what they see. Not to validate you. To give you accurate information when the environment around you is not providing it.

And if the role ends: the story of what happened is not yours to interpret alone. It may also be a story about what was handed to you, and what was never actually put in place for you to succeed. That distinction matters. It matters especially when you are deciding what you are willing to lead next.

The glass cliff is not a reason to stop leading. It is a reason to stop accepting the full weight of a broken system as a personal verdict.

“The glass cliff is not a reason to stop leading. It is a reason to stop accepting the full weight of a broken system as a personal verdict.”