The rigged test of leadership

Ryan and Haslam are the researchers who first coined the term "glass cliff," after looking at the performance of FTSE 100 companies (in the UK) before and after the appointment of new board members. They found that when there was an overall period of stock market decline, companies which appointed women, or racially marginalized men, to their boards were more likely than others to have already experienced consistently bad performance for the previous five months.

Alison Cook and Christy Glass looked at a data set of Fortune 500 companies (in the US) over a 15-year period. Like Ryan and Haslam, they also found that marginalized people were much more likely to be promoted to CEO in companies whose performance is already weak.

This is an article featuring an interview with Karen Anderson, and a deeper dive into a Glass Cliff case study — when HP hired Meg Whitman as CEO.

The studies made by the Lean In Foundation are amazing — they’re one of the very few data sources that break up data by both race and gender, allowing us to get a much better, more nuanced, more intersectional viewpoint on what’s happening, In this particular study, it’s really interesting to see the breakdown of the different demographics represented at each level in their careers, from entry level to C-Suite.

This, to me, was the most shocking piece of research around the Glass Cliff. This study found that when a female or racially marginalized person was appointed to a CEO position, white male upper management (so, the majority of senior managers) tended to feel less able to identify with the company as a whole. These men did not see themselves mirrored back at the top level of the business, as they’ve become used to, and so they felt less attached to, and less invested in the business overall. As a result, they also stopped offering support and management to their team members who were also not white and male — disadvantaging what would be the next generation of under-represented leadership.

One thing that’s so important, but that I simply didn’t have time to include in my talk, is the impact that bias plays in the creation and maintenance of the Glass Cliff. As this study shows, the impact of this bias can be really clearly shown by the fact that people have an increased tendency to think that people who are unlike them (if they hold a societally majority position) who have reached positions of success, have achieved this position because of "special treatment." And so because they don’t believe that their success has been earned, they are quick to dismiss that success (after all, we could all be successful if we’d had the same opportunities handed to us). Studies have shown that white people tend to hold the belief that Black people who are successful, have been so at least in part due to affirmative action or positive discrimination. Men also often put women’s successes down to the same. This gives them further reason to believe that not only do these people not deserve these roles, they are poorly equipped to execute them. Again, Black women are subject to double jeopardy in this regard throughout their lives.