What is the glass cliff? The complete guide

A one-sentence definition

The glass cliff is the tendency for women, and members of other groups that are under-represented in leadership, to be appointed to senior roles at moments of crisis or decline, when those roles are riskier and the chance of failure is higher than usual.

The metaphor extends the better-known glass ceiling. The ceiling is the invisible barrier that stops people from reaching the top. The cliff is what some of them find when they do get through: a position on an edge that is hard to see until you are standing on it.

Where the term came from

In 2003 a newspaper article in The Times argued that companies with more women on their boards had performed worse on the stock market. Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, social psychologists at the University of Exeter, looked at the same kind of data with a different question: what was happening to those companies before the women were appointed?

Their study of FTSE 100 companies, published in the British Journal of Management in 2005, found that firms that appointed a woman to the board were more likely to have experienced consistently poor share-price performance in the months before the appointment. In other words, the poor performance came first. They called the pattern the glass cliff.

The idea spread quickly. The New York Times listed it among the ideas of 2008, and "glass cliff" made the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year shortlist in 2016.

What the evidence says

Two decades of research have tested the idea in three main ways:

• Archival studies look at real appointments and compare the condition of organisations before men and women took charge.
• Experiments ask participants to choose between equally qualified candidates for a company that is either doing well or doing badly.
• Interviews and surveys ask leaders about the roles they were offered and the support they received.

The strongest single summary is a 2020 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Thekla Morgenroth, Teri Kirby, Michelle Ryan and Antonia Sudkämper. Pooling studies of all three kinds, they found evidence consistent with the glass cliff for women, but with important caveats. In real-world appointment data the effect was small and depended on the sector. In experiments, women were more likely than men to be selected for leadership in a crisis, and that effect was larger in countries with higher gender inequality. The pattern also extended to members of under-represented racial and ethnic groups.

Not every study agrees. A 2009 analysis of US firms by Susan Adams and colleagues found no sign that women were appointed to weaker companies, and a 2025 study of US corporate data using several measures of distress also found no clear effect. We cover the full debate in Twenty years of glass cliff research.

Why it happens

Researchers have proposed several explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive:

• "Think crisis, think female." Experiments by Ryan, Haslam and colleagues found that the traits people stereotypically associate with women, such as being understanding and good with people, are the traits people say they want in a leader of a struggling organisation, especially one that needs to manage people through difficulty.
• A signal of change. Susanne Bruckmüller and Nyla Branscombe found that when a company with a history of male leaders was in trouble, participants preferred a female candidate, apparently because she represented a break from the past.
• Scarce opportunity. When top roles rarely open up for under-represented candidates, a risky role can look like the only chance on offer, so it is more likely to be accepted.
• Expendability. Some commentators argue that organisations may see an atypical leader as easier to blame if things go wrong.
• Weaker networks. Leaders with fewer connections to decision-makers may get less warning about the true state of an organisation before they accept.

Why it matters

A role taken on in a crisis is harder to succeed in. When the leader is new, visible and atypical, failure is easily misread as evidence about the person rather than the situation. Research on CEOs has found that women have shorter tenures and higher dismissal risk than men, and that this gap widens when they are appointed during weak performance. Work by Alison Cook and Christy Glass also describes a "saviour effect": when an under-represented leader's organisation keeps struggling, the replacement is disproportionately likely to be a white man.

The cost is not only personal. Every visible "failure" reinforces the stereotype that made the appointment risky in the first place.

Is every crisis appointment a glass cliff?

No. Crisis roles can be career-defining, and many leaders choose them deliberately. The question is not whether a role is hard, but whether the person in it has been given a fair chance: an honest picture of the situation, the authority and resources to act, enough time, and support when it gets difficult. A difficult role with those things in place is a turnaround. A difficult role without them is a cliff. Our guide Is a crisis role a career accelerator? explores when to say yes.

We do not label named individuals as "glass cliff cases" on this site. Appointments are complicated, and the research describes patterns across many cases, not verdicts on any one person.

What to do about it

If you are offered a high-stakes role

1. Run the Glass Cliff Risk Scanner on the offer.
2. Ask for the facts before you sign: finances, legal exposure, and why the last leader left. See twelve red flags in a leadership offer.
3. Negotiate the protections that matter: a written mandate, resources, time, a board sponsor and fair exit terms. Our Offer Protection Builder turns your risks into a checklist.

If you are on a board or appointing panel

1. Write down the condition of the organisation and share it with every candidate.
2. Offer the same package, authority and support you would offer any leader in a crisis.
3. Judge progress on the trend, not the starting level. Our Board Appointment Check covers the essentials.