The Glass Cliff

'And then I saw it. And once I had seen it, I saw it everywhere.'
People who don't fit our typical image of a leader – those who aren't both white and male – are often only hired in a leadership role when a business is already underperforming. And when a business is doing well, these same candidates are overlooked, considered to be risky appointments. This is the story of the glass cliff: when the chances of success for underrepresented leaders - read: women - are cut short before they even begin to work.
To understand the glass cliff is to understand a story of structural inequity disguised as personal failure. It is a story of women and work, a story of socialized gender norms and misguided executives desperately trying to diversify in a world that's designed to disable diversification. It is a vice, suspending women in impossible-to-win, precarious positions, refusing to let them go until a silent, firm hand in the small of their back pushes them to their professional death, nobody ever telling them that it was factors outside of their control that pre-ordained their fatalistic demise.
But it doesn't need to be this way. Not all is lost. Once we can understand the phenomenon, once we can stand together and face it head-first, we can start to unravel so many other narratives about women's leadership experiences - and their untapped potential - that just don't make sense without it. By understanding the glass cliff, and by telling one another about it, we can affect the conversation, we can empower one another to overcome societal bias and, ultimately, we can change the world.