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Women get handed leadership roles disproportionately in times of crisis, leaving many at the helm of failing companies and political parties. ANU Professor Michelle Ryan dubbed this phenomenon “the glass cliff”, contributing to higher failure rates and lower leadership tenure.
Last Wednesday (1 October), ANU Professor Michelle Ryan told the 2025 Women Unlimited Conference in Sydney about her research on the “glass cliff”, a phenomenon where women are much more likely to be appointed to leadership roles in a time of crisis.
“What we find is that in all of these studies, over and over and over again, a female candidate is much more likely to be chosen when things are going badly,” Ryan said.
“If you take on leadership positions in crisis, when things are going badly, share prices plummeting, you can imagine that that’s a much harder job and the chance of failure is much higher than if you take on a leadership position when everything is going well.”
Ryan and her research partner, Alex Haslam, first investigated the glass cliff phenomenon after reading a front-page newspaper article that cited data showing that UK companies with more women on their leadership teams had poorer share prices. It concluded that women’s leadership was “wreaking havoc” on corporations.
“I guess as an academic, I wanted to see, like, is this just hyperbole? Is this journalistic license? Or is there actually real evidence to suggest that women are coming in and causing companies to do bad things?” Ryan told the conference on Wednesday.
While share prices typically went up following a leadership appointment, regardless of gender, Ryan and Haslam’s analysis found that women were significantly more likely to be appointed to boards after a period of poor share price performance.
“In the six months leading up to women being appointed, there was a massive drop in share price, and then they were appointed, then share prices went up. So women are definitely not wreaking havoc on company performance,” Ryan said.
“What’s happening is when companies are performing badly, they appoint female leaders.”
Haslam and Ryan went on to conduct experimental studies, which found supporting evidence for these real-world observations.
The researchers asked study participants to select a suitable leader across various hypothetical scenarios – a financial director, a lead lawyer, and a political candidate. Two possible candidates – a man and a woman – were presented as equally qualified, while a third candidate was less qualified.
Across all scenarios, participants chose the qualified man and the woman equally for the leadership position in a “business-as-usual” scenario. However, in times of crisis, they were significantly more likely to choose the qualified female candidate.
Ryan linked this to numerous real-world examples of the “glass cliff” phenomenon, including the election of Sussan Ley as the first female leader of the Liberal Party, off the back of one of the party’s most catastrophic election defeats.
“What happens when the Coalition has one of the worst electoral performances they’ve ever had?” Ryan said.
“Well, we get a woman appointed for the first time as a leader of the Liberal Party.”
The psychology underpinning the “glass cliff” phenomenon was complex and likely the result of multiple compounding factors, Ryan said. These included “boys’ club” cultures and a lack of other opportunities for women, prompting them to go for leadership roles that men avoid.
“I was in the UK when Theresa May took over as Prime Minister after Brexit. I think that was a fascinating sort of scenario because after the Brexit referendum, I’ve never seen men run in the opposite direction of leadership quite as fast as I did then,” she said.
“Why are [women] taking this poison chalice?
“Theresa May wasn’t stupid, right? She knew that it was a poison chalice, but she also knew that she would never have an opportunity to be PM if she didn’t take it.”
For companies or political parties in crisis, the decision to appoint a female leader could also be an attempt to signal change.
“I think the idea there is, well, what’s the easiest way to signal change? Signal that we’re doing something different?” Ryan said.
“Let’s appoint someone [who’s] almost the exact opposite of what we had or, you know, very different from what we have. So I think there’s definitely this idea of signalling change.”
While the “glass cliff” phenomenon was a tricky one to address, steeped in deeply entrenched gender stereotypes and norms surrounding what leadership should look like, Ryan had some suggestions to address misconceptions about women’s leadership, especially in crisis situations.
“If you are going to take on a glass cliff position, if you’re going to be dealing with all of that crisis, it’s really important that other people are aware that you’re dealing with that crisis so that you can be evaluated more fairly,” Ryan said.
“I think it’s also really important that you get the support and the resources that you need. Dealing with a crisis requires a whole lot of other resources than just keeping a leadership job on an even keel. So that might be support from senior management, it might be support from colleagues, it might be just more money.”
She added that quantity measures of women in leadership roles were helpful, but didn’t address the whole picture. Having more women leaders didn’t necessarily “trickle down” to gender equality across the whole organisation.
“We really need to be asking much more complex questions when we talk about women in leadership. Not just about numbers, but questions about when, how and why,” Ryan said.
