What Is the Glass-Cliff Theory, and What Does It Have to Do With Kamala Harris? Let Us Explain

Soon after President Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president on Sunday, Google reported that searches for the term “glass cliff” had tripled. This was far from a coincidence.

Many are familiar with the glass ceiling, a term first coined by writer Marilyn Loden in 1978 to describe the invisible barrier faced by women as they try to advance to senior leadership positions. (Loden used it in a speech before the Women’s Action Alliance, a feminist organization based in New York.) The term gained greater ground in the 1980s, a decade that saw women entering the workforce en masse. “Women have reached a certain point—I call it the glass ceiling,” Gay Bryant, an editor of Working Woman magazine, told Adweek in 1984. “They’re in the top of middle management, and they’re stopping and getting stuck.” Soon, specific variations caught on in different industries: The marble ceiling, for example, is used for those in politics.

Forty-six years later, more and more occupational minorities are breaking through the glass ceiling. (Still not enough, though: According to a 2023 McKiney report, white women make up only 22% of employees in the C-suite. Women of color make up 6%.) The glass cliff is a metaphor for what happens next.

What is the glass cliff?

“The glass cliff refers to the tendency to promote white women and men and women of color to highly visible leadership roles during times of crisis or scandal,” says Utah State University professor of sociology Christy Glass. Along with her colleague Alison Cook, Glass has studied the glass cliff in corporate settings and collegiate sports for decades.

What is the history of the phrase glass cliff?

University of Exeter psychology professors Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam came up with the term glass cliff. In 2003, Ryan read a Times of London article reporting that British companies with more women on their boards of directors tended to have lower average share prices than those with fewer or no women. Looking into the data the Times cited, however, she found flaws. Mainly: They hadn’t looked at when those women were being appointed.

So Ryan and Haslam did. The two found that more often than not, women were asked to join boards when companies were already performing poorly. Then came the notion of the glass cliff: Yes, these women got senior leadership positions—but only when the risk of failure was especially high. The term, therefore, is meant to evoke “this idea of women teetering on the edge and that their fall, or their failure, might be imminent,” Ryan said on the Freakonomics podcast in 2018.

Why are women given leadership positions in uncertain situations?

Stephen J. Dubner, host of the Freakonomics podcast, offered two different theories.

Here’s the glass-half-full one: “The appointment of a female CEO to a troubled company isn’t so much a suicide mission as a rescue mission. If you wanted to get Jungian, you might look at this as one big mother complex. That is: when an institution is in trouble, it cries out for Mommy to make it all better. But when things are going along okay, eh—Dad’ll do,” he said in that episode.

Then there’s the glass-half-empty reading: “A typical male CEO candidate can afford to pass up an opportunity at a troubled company, knowing there’s likely to be another opportunity soon,” Dubner said. “Which leaves more openings at troubled companies for women.”

Is there any empirical data to support the glass-cliff theory?

Yes. In Glass and Cook’s study “Above the Glass Ceiling,” published in the Strategic Management Journal in 2013, they looked at all CEO transitions in Fortune 500 companies over a 15-year period. Here’s what they found: “Consistent with the theory of the glass cliff, we find that occupational minorities—defined as white women and men and women of color—are more likely than white men to be promoted to CEO of weakly performing firms.”

What are some real-life examples of the glass cliff?

One often-cited example of the glass cliff at work is the prime ministership of Theresa May, Britain’s first female PM since Margaret Thatcher nearly 30 years earlier. May was appointed in 2016, weeks after the Brexit vote, and during her three years in office, she oversaw the United Kingdom’s complicated negotiations to leave the European Union—only to see her deal for the UK to withdraw from the EU rejected by Parliament three times in 2019. (Indeed, the election of Thatcher—who entered office just after the Winter of Discontent—was arguably another example.)

Stateside, consider Stephanie Pope, who became the CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes this year as the company confronts disastrous safety issues with its 737 models. Or Linda Yaccarino, who became the CEO of X in 2023 after its controversial takeover by Elon Musk, which led to a swift decline in monthly ad revenue. “These two examples are important because both women were exceptionally qualified for the jobs,” Glass says. “However, they were only given the opportunity when the companies were already in crisis. This means that their leadership trajectory is fraught with risk and their hypervisibility as women CEOs only enhances the scrutiny they will receive.”

What does the glass cliff have to do with Kamala Harris?

Given her experience as California’s attorney general, a California senator, and vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris is undoubtedly extremely qualified to be a Democratic candidate for president. She also has the steadfast support of her party, with endorsements from President Joe Biden, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and majority leader Chuck Schumer. Yet with her campaign forced to begin amid the tumult of Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the race—and with barely more than 100 days until Election Day—some are wondering if she is facing a classic glass-cliff scenario.

Does being on a glass cliff always result in a negative outcome?

A glass cliff is, yes, synonymous with a difficult situation. But it does not mean failure is a fait accompli. Glass spent several years speaking to white women, as well as men and women of color, who had faced glass cliffs. Several of them were leaders of some of America’s largest companies. All of them were the first in their demographic to be appointed to such a role.

“They told us that from early in their careers, they realized that their race and/or gender made them visible and invited scrutiny and a burden of doubt about their ability,” Glass says. “ To counter those negative stereotypes, they chose a high-risk career path. They understood that to be seen as a leader, they had to go above and beyond and they had to be flawless. So by the time they were appointed CEO, they had spent a career leading through the crisis.” Glass calls this a “risk tax.”

Those who paid it, she found, developed an unparalleled and specialized skill set. “Despite the innumerable challenges glass-cliff appointments create for leaders, many of the leaders tapped to lead through crisis are prepared to do so,” she says. “Glass-cliff appointees are exceptional.”