This interview was originally published through Audible Sessions.
Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.
Holly Newson: I'm Holly Newson. Welcome to Audible Sessions, a place where we delve into the books, careers and lives of authors and creators. Many of us have heard of, or maybe encountered, the glass ceiling. But what happens when women do get to those leadership positions? Well, that's where the glass cliff can come in. Author Sophie Williams tells us all about it in her brand-new book, The Glass Cliff. So, what is it?
Sophie Williams: The glass cliff is a phenomenon, it's a societal phenomenon, and it essentially just means that women are more than often appointed to leadership roles when their chances of failing are high. So, essentially, businesses bring in female leaders when they're already in some kind of moment of crisis. And so that means that women's tenures in roles are often shorter, women have a harder time, and not because of women's innate abilities or lack of abilities, but because of what our expectations of leadership are, and what our expectations of leaders and what they look like and who they are.
HN: And so everyone, I wouldn't say everyone, most people will have heard of the glass ceiling – this kind of management level that women often find themselves hitting against and not being able to progress beyond. So, is the glass ceiling related to the glass cliff?
SW: Absolutely. So, in talking about the glass cliff, we really talk about the glass ceiling, the glass cliff and the glass escalator. So, the glass ceiling, as you say, is that sort of invisible but seemingly impossible to break through barrier that sits above the heads of women in business and stops them from reaching not only the heights of what we imagine as the pinnacles of professional success, it also stops them from reaching the pinnacles of their own abilities, because they hit against this barrier and they just don't find a way through often.
But when we look at businesses, we know that there are some female leaders, there are some women who step into those most senior roles. And so when we stop the conversation, when we talk about the glass ceiling, we don't really imagine or examine what the experience is like for those people who do break through that ceiling. And that, unfortunately, for a lot of women, is the experience of the glass cliff. Because even when women are wonderful and talented and ambitious and deserve it, we often find that the opportunities only come when there's a problem to solve or when there's a moment of crisis that the business is already in. And so the glass cliff is what happens when you break through the glass ceiling and, unfortunately, you're more likely to break through the glass ceiling when there's a big problem that people are looking to you to solve.
HN: And you also mentioned the glass escalator there. So, explain what that one is as well.
SW: So, if the glass cliff is the experience for women in leadership, the glass escalator – and it's so hard to keep them all correct in my mind, but I've come to think of them as my little glass menagerie, like all of the little things that can happen. And the glass escalator is what we generally see for white men in female-dominated businesses. So, unlike women in traditionally male-dominated businesses, which is most industries, we see them hitting their heads against this glass ceiling. For men in traditionally female industries – that could be publishing, that could be marketing, that could be PR, that could be nursing or health care or these jobs that have these expectations of heightened soft skills – is we see men actually be fast-tracked. We see men in these industries that are dominated by women not really forming that entry-level pool, not really forming that middle management pool, but being escalated, being sped up into these leadership positions.
The NHS is a really good example of this, and it's an example I mention in the book. We can see that men in the NHS represent 31 percent of their entire employee pool. But when we look at the highest-paying jobs, men in the NHS take up 42 percent of those highest paying jobs. So, although they only represent 31 percent of the workforce overall, they're so deeply overrepresented at that most senior level. Whereas women hold 78 percent of the lowest-paid jobs in the NHS. So, we have these workforces that are primarily women but we just see that the men, and not all men – speaking intersectionally, it needs whiteness and maleness for this to happen – but we see white men float to the top in these industries where women are doing sort of the majority of the representation in the business.
HN: And so a lot of this is, with the glass cliff, we're thinking about those women who have broken through to the CEO level. For anyone, male, female, nonbinary, who maybe thinks, "I'm not aspiring to leadership, or I'm never going to get to a leadership position, or I do a role where actually it's a practical role and that's not what I'm aiming for," is the glass cliff still relevant for them? And if so, why?
SW: Absolutely. So, I think the glass cliff is really relevant for all of us because, if nothing else, it impacts how we think and feel about women and how we think and feel about women's abilities. So, if we don't see many women in senior roles and the few that we do are seen to be failing, are seen to be struggling, are seen to be getting fired or leaving the business really quickly, that just re-establishes in our minds what women are capable of and what we should and shouldn't be considering different people for. And whether we aim to sort of step into those positions ourselves, whether we aim to be a female leader, we still, I think, all know the value of representation. We all know that the more diverse people from diverse backgrounds we see in different spaces, the more that encourages and democratises that space for other people. So, whether it's our dream or not, it can help other people to dream that dream and see that aspiration.
The other way it impacts us is we see it in public life. I always want to have a little caveat here when I talk about Theresa May [laughs] because I'm like, "I'm not sorry." But I do think when we look at the circumstances in which Theresa May stepped into her prime minister role, they were really difficult, right? There had just been a referendum for Brexit. She was on the side of remain. But she became prime minister just after the UK had gone through a referendum and decided to leave the European Union. David Cameron, who took us through that referendum, was nowhere to be seen in dealing with the actual job of making that happen, nor was Boris Johnson, nor was Nigel Farage, who was the person who was so vocal. All of these men who had said, "We want to do this," when that finally came to fruition, everyone stepped back and said, "We're not actually going to put our reputations, we're not going to put our work on the line for this." And so that opened a space for Theresa May to step into the role relatively unchallenged, and the implications and the aftermath of trying to get through a Brexit deal, which she didn't ask for and was actually against, had serious repercussions for her performance and her tenure as prime minister.
HN: So, why are women stepping into these risky or precarious leadership positions?
SW: I think it's probably a two-part thing. There's a phenomenon and it's called “think manager, think male.” And on the whole, we are so used to seeing men in leadership positions and whatever that position is, by default, when we think of a manager, when we think of someone who we should bring in to make great change or bring in to sort of take the reins of something that's going really well, we see men as sort of a proven quantity, as sort of “if it's not broken, don't fix it.” We've had successful male leaders for all of this time. And so when things aren't going wrong, people seem to have this tendency to say, "Well, men have always been safe pairs of hands and they will continue to be. We're going to bring him into this leadership position."
But there's another phenomenon, which is called “think crisis, think female.” When there is a big problem, it could be a hit to profitability or to stock market standing. It could be a reputational issue that's gone on with the business where the tarnish is likely to be passed on to that new leader. But whatever it is, when we see businesses that are in some kind of moment of crisis, we see them looking for people who they imagine, who they perceive, to have soft skills, to have that sort of bring you under their arm as mother and stroke your hair and tell you everything's going to be okay.
And so when businesses are in trouble, they look for, consciously or unconsciously, people who they imagine will have the soft skills to make people feel better and to bring us back around, not to great success, but to feeling better. And then when the team feels better, what generally happens is we see that woman is exited because she's become associated with bad times, right? When she joined the business, everything was bad. And so she has that stigma attached to her and she's able to be exited and replaced more often than not by a white male leader, and that's called the saviour effect and it says to us, to investors, to shareholders, to employees, "We're back with that safe pair of hands. We're back to business as usual."
I think the other part of the answer to your question of why are women taking on these roles is that's the opportunities that by and large they are being given. Even incredibly talented, ambitious women struggle to get the same opportunities as their male counterparts. And we see that from the very, very beginning of their careers. So, a person's first step to management, we see that women are facing what's being called a broken rung, the broken rung on that first step of that ladder up. So, for every 100 men who get their first promotion into leadership, only 87 women get that same promotion. So then when you're looking at the next layer, there's a smaller group of women to choose from to promote up, and it becomes smaller and smaller as we go farther and farther up.
I think women are so used to the fact that we've been told we're going to hit our heads on this glass ceiling, there's going to be a limit to how far you can progress, when someone says, "Here's an opportunity for you, do you want it?" we might decide to shoot our shot, even when that's a long shot. Because we worry that we're never going to get that opportunity handed to us again.
HN: You mentioned that, often, it's a woman that's been brought in and then a man, a white man, replaces them. How often do female CEOs follow female CEOs into those jobs?
SW: Almost never. There was a woman who was the CEO of Xerox and she had a successful exit and was replaced by [Ursula] Burns. That was the first time that a woman had succeeded another woman in a Fortune 500 company to the CEO position. And it was also the first time that a Black person had succeeded a woman in that position as well. And so it is actually really vanishingly rare to see in big businesses, women replace women in those most senior leadership roles.
HN: So, is that connected to the glass cliff? Is there anything else going on there?
SW: I mean, there's loads of stuff going on. I'm not at all saying that there are no super talented white men. There are. Of course, there are. And sometimes they will be the absolute best choice for a role. But the prevalence of that one single demographic, both whiteness and maleness, in those most senior roles does seem like there's something else going on. Because it would be really, really strange if only white men were talented in that way. And part of it will be because of who gets sponsorship early in their career, who gets those opportunities to step forward in their career, and what we expect of women once they step into those senior roles.
So, when women are in senior roles, for example, they're still expected to do loads of office housework. They're still expected to take drinks orders and make cups of coffee. And they're expected to do, I think it's 28 percent more work around diversity and inclusion than male leaders. They're expected to mentor their own teams. They're expected to do all of these really soft skill pieces. And so in some ways, because of our societal expectations of nurturing and soft skills and mothering, when women step into these roles, they're really doing a few roles at once. They're doing the job of having to be excellent in their role.
We also find that female leaders are more often challenged and suggested that their expertise is lacking or that they're not qualified for their roles. So, they have to constantly re-prove their right to exist within that space. And they have to take on all of the really emotional interpersonal work of taking care of a team and managing their success and advocating for their needs. And so we have all of these different expectations that are put on female and male leaders, which actually means that female leaders are often doing loads and loads of invisible jobs on top of the actual job of keeping a business running. It's not fair.
HN: You also write in the book that when a female CEO is brought in, if the layer below them, that kind of like leadership team, are all white men, then often they sort of check out. So, why does that happen?
SW: So, in that I'm building on the research of lots of academics who have looked into this, and the why isn't entirely clear, but I think the phenomenon of this checking out is incredibly interesting. So, what generally happens is, when a leader is brought in, what generally happens is they are leading a larger cohort of people who hold both whiteness and maleness, and we can see that because of that broken rung conversation. When we don't promote women early on, there's a smaller pool to choose from as we go up and often that starts to distil into a leadership layer that is both white and men.
I think research from the Lean In Foundation found that entry-level men represent about 30 percent of that junior entry-level cohort. But by the time you reach the C-suite, that representation has ballooned to well above 60 percent. And so another way to say that would be white men are the only group who don't face the glass ceiling. They're the only group at all, of anyone, they're the only demographic group whose representation grows as they become more senior. Everyone else's representation shrinks as they become more senior. And so the implication of this is men, particularly white men, are used to looking up at those most senior people from the very beginnings of their careers and seeing themselves represented in that way.
So, the researchers in the piece that we're talking about spoke to white men when they got a leader who didn't represent them in terms of either their gender or their ethnicity. And what they found is, as you say, they checked out. They self-reported feeling less personally invested in the business and less able to personally identify with the business, and that meant that their work performance suffered. They did worse at their jobs. But they also disinvested in a really interesting way. They stopped mentoring, working with, developing, nurturing, building up their teams, but they didn't do that equally. They primarily stopped helping, working with, developing anyone in their teams who had the same marginalised intersections as the new leader.
So, if they had a new leader who was a Black woman, they wouldn't help the Black female people in their team, or the female people in their team. So, in this way, these people who were so used to seeing themselves represented and mirrored back, when they didn't get that immediate representation from their leader, they just stopped doing their jobs in an effective way and they stopped building up what could be this new generation of underrepresented leaders because these people who they're meant to be managing are just not getting the same time, care, attention or development that the rest of their peers are getting.
I think the wildest thing about this research is that they told people! Like, you couldn't drag it out of me. But this is just what these people are comfortable saying. They're comfortable saying, "I don't recognise myself in this person. So, I do my job worse and I help other people like them less." I find it absolutely astonishing. Like, I can't imagine being that researcher and having these people tell you that and just being like, "Okay, I'll just write that down like it's not a problem.” It's bizarre to me.
HN: Yeah, and then obviously that will affect whoever is that CEO because they've come into maybe a difficult situation in the workforce anyway, and then they don't have the support that they should be getting from their senior leadership team.
SW: Absolutely.
HN: And so again they're kind of set up to fail.
SW: Yeah, and I think that's a really important part of the glass cliff. A big reason that these women are seen to fail is even the most spectacular leader is not going to come in to a company that is in crisis and fix it single-handedly. Whoever that new leader was needs to rely on their team. They need to rely on the people whose job is to be a functional part of that team. And if your mere existence in the body that you occupy means that those people disinvest and they stop doing their work, your chances of being able to make any transformational change in a struggling business, they're kind of gone from the start, because you need that team. You're never going to do it alone. And so they are just pushing these female leaders just closer and closer to the edge of their own cliff. They're pushing them closer and closer to the perception of failure, not because they've done anything, but because they haven't been able to get the sponsorship and the investment from that layer of people who are essential in being part of that change.
HN: You write that, in general, female CEOs are getting fired more than men. Their tenures are shorter. Is that because they're coming into these failing companies and, like you said earlier, once everything seems a bit smoother, you replace them with a white man. Or is it also happening when they've come into an okay company, they're doing a good job, but we get rid of them anyway?
SW: It's kind of a mix of both. Women are given less time to fail, which is also to say women are given less time to succeed. If you come into a business, and it's tricky, if it's having problems before you even arrive, then you need time to first get the lay of the land, to find out exactly what's going on, then to put in your plans to make that change and to implement them. And whoever you are, that's probably not a two-week solution, that's not a two-week process. So, we need to give the people who are taking on these risky positions in already-challenging environments the time that they need to make that change. And so when we fire women disproportionately early, which is what we see happening, we're not giving them the time to turn those failures into successes.
But when we do give the time to turn those failures into successes, one of the things that we see is when a woman is in charge of a business that has had a period of difficulty, that's had a period of crisis, we have a tendency to lump together unusual things. And so we could have “this business is failing, this business is in a real moment of public crisis,” which is unusual, and separately, “this business is run by a woman.” Those could be entirely separate things, especially if that woman is being brought in when the business is already in a moment of crisis. But what we tend to do, what we tend to see people doing, is linking those as inextricably connected. We say, "This business that's run by a woman is failing."
And so even from the very first steps in, she becomes a figurehead for failure within the business. And what we see and what's so unfair about the glass cliff is we see that these women become figureheads for failings that happened before they even took on the role. So, their chances of having this long and successful tenure are so limited because they become associated not only with the trouble that they're trying to fix while they're in the role but all of the things that have happened before they joined. So, if you're a business and you have someone in your leadership who is associated fairly or unfairly with failure, it could be a really good strategic move to just exit them.
And what we're really saying is, "We're getting rid of these problems. We're getting rid of this time period where this person was here and all these things were bad. And now we're moving into a moment of celebration and we're doing that in this ‘think manager, thing male’ way, we're doing that with what is most likely to be a white man because that is a proven safe pair of hands to lead a business."
HN: Were you surprised when you started looking into this and you found this out? Because some of it are things where, I don't know, you just think, "Oh, well, we're not in the '70s anymore. Things are better. Things are fine, hopefully.” [laughs]
SW: [Laughs] Yeah, fingers crossed. That's the story we get, right? We get so much of this narrative of progression and equality and “we've come so far.” And we have come a long way in a lot of respects, but there are some areas where we haven't come as far as we like to congratulate ourselves for coming. When we look at equal payday, we see that women on average earn so much less than men that they may as well not be paid for the last few weeks, or in some cases months, of the year. And then we add an intersectional look into that, we see that Black women's equal payday is often in August or September. And so their earnings gap for nothing more than the body that they exist in and inhabit and work in is tremendous, and I think that's incredible.
But yeah, I was shocked. I was shocked and made so sad by so many of the stats and pieces of research that I found when I was researching for this. Because, to be honest, when I first started learning about the glass cliff, it's because I was looking for a success story. I was writing another book and it was about Black women in the workplace. I was like, "What would it be like to have a Black female boss? Is that really great for everyone around her? Is that really great for the more junior Black women in her business? Like, what is that like?" And that's when I discovered the glass cliff, and I was like, "Oh, this is not the success story. This is not the happy feel-good story that I was looking for."
But it was a story that I recognised. I suddenly realised that I'd never heard the words the glass cliff, but I'd seen that experience playing out in businesses that I'd worked in or in public life. I think what's been so interesting for me in learning more about the glass cliff and having more conversations about the glass cliff is I feel like as soon as we give people the language to say, "This is what's happening," the response is almost always, "Oh, yeah, I've seen this." People recognise it.
HN: Definitely. And you're right that not only are we maybe not in a period of progression for women at the moment, but potentially we're in a period of regression. So, why is that? What are the factors that are leading into that assertion, that fact?
SW: So, that's another thing that I was really surprised to learn. I was really excited in 2023 because I was invited to be part of the United Nations delegation for the UK for the Commission for the State of Women conference. That's a week-long conference held at the UN, but it was held in New York and so I attended virtually from my laptop, from my sofa, so I was probably the cosiest UN delegate there was [laughs]. And that was the message that came through in the secretary general's opening speech and then in all of the speeches pretty much that came for the rest of the week. I had really thought it was going to be a week of celebrating women and how far we've come and looking to the future. But the message that came through time and time again from people working in education, from people working in health care, from people working in safety, from people working in digital spaces, whatever it was, the message just kept being, "The rights that we are so proud that we've won for women are going backwards."
The stat that really stood out for me was in the secretary general's opening speech, where he said that before COVID, the UN estimated that women were about 100 years away from equality globally. And I'm aware that during this we talk a lot about women and men, and we're not talking about nonbinary people or other gender identities and that's a real downfall of the available research. I do try and bring in intersectional views when I can, but that is really lacking in the story that we're able to tell. But going back to the United Nations, they said that pre-COVID they had estimated that we were about 100 years away from global gender equality, which is amazing. Then in 2023, they reassessed, post-COVID, and the UK alone had gone up to 120 years.
So, we are so pleased and proud of ourselves for making that progress that we don't stop to think, "Are we still making it? Are we still making it at the same rate? Are we still making it in the way that we're congratulating ourselves for?" I've been really sad to see that the answer seems to be, "Not really, not yet." And I think we have to, as sad as it is, we have to acknowledge that, because if we don't, we can't fix it.
But once we know that we're falling behind those targets, once we know that we're losing some of the rights that we've gained, and we can see that really clearly when we think about Roe v. Wade, abortion rights in America, when we think about all of the kinds of things that come in that affect women's lives and livelihoods and abilities to live a free and healthy and happy life. We can see that they are being eroded. And I think we do need people to say, "Have you noticed this?" Then we can start to fix it. Otherwise, we just rest on the complacency of the progress that we have made and stop trying to either push that forward or safeguard what we have already got.
HN: What are your thoughts on things like diversity quotas? Do you think they're a positive method to have a more diverse workforce?
SW: So, whilst this book is really focusing on a gender conversation, the majority of my work has focused on race, or at least the intersection of race and gender. In that work, I've always been kind of dubious of quotas, because I've always felt like I wouldn't want to be brought into a space and ever worry that I was only there because I was a number. No one wants that for themselves. Talking about that sort of senior white male layer of disinvestment, part of that is a lack of trust that that person who they are now reporting to has earned their space. We tend to see that white men generally overestimate the amount of affirmative action that has put people into the spaces that they would imagine would be for themselves, to speak very broadly.
And so I've always been really wary of and reluctant to endorse quotas. But in my research for The Glass Cliff, I was looking at countries where the glass cliff doesn't exist. I think that's really important to point out. Because when we talk about the glass cliff, we talk about it as a societal phenomenon, and it absolutely is. But like all societal phenomenon, it's the product of the society that it's in. And so when we look at other countries, to use Turkey for example, there's loads of research done around why can't people find evidence for the glass cliff in Turkey? And researchers imagine or have posited, have put forward, that it's because they have a more matrilineal society. They expect women to be in more powerful positions. They also have a less individualistic society than us.
So, when you think of the UK, when you think of the US, we're societies where we are told that we will succeed or fail on our own terms, that we are responsible for ourselves. We are responsible for our own failures, we're responsible for our own successes. That can be really empowering to some people, but it also allows us to overlook the societal and structural inequities that mean that's not quite true all of the time for everyone.
I was looking into some places where the glass cliff doesn't exist. I was looking into some places like Norway, where we have had evidence for these sorts of disparities but we've been able to overcome them. And the way that a lot of countries have been able to overcome them is by having quite strict quota systems. That quota system really sets, at a governmental level, targets for representation. We want to have businesses that have at least 40 percent representation of women at a board level. And so when a government puts a line in a sand like that, and as is the case with some of the countries I talk about in the book, when they say, "You will be penalised if you fail to meet that," suddenly this argument of, "Well, there aren't any good women out there" disappears, and they find them. And these women step into position and they do well. The businesses that they are now working with also start doing better. They don't just start doing better for women, they start performing better, their profitability goes up, their EBIT is higher, their business is stronger.
And so I think I might be a convert on quotas. I think it'd be really great if we could trust and rely on people to do the things that need to be done to create equitable workplaces themselves. But we've waited and they haven't. So now we might have to do it.
HN: Yeah. When you discovered the glass cliff, I'm guessing your first instinct wasn't, "I'm going to write a book." So, why did you decide that you're going to write a book on this?
SW: It took me a really, really long time from discovering the phenomenon to even crossing my mind, "I could write a book about this." I discovered it when I was researching for my first book, and there's a chapter in that called “The Glass Cliff” and I was like, "Okay, this is interesting." Then I was invited to do a TED Talk and that was really exciting and I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd really like to do this, please." But they asked me to do a TED Talk about allyship, because my second book is called Anti-Racist Ally and that's about stepping into those sort of activist areas. And they said, "People often talk to us about allyship, and we don't have a talk to point them to. We'd love you to do a talk, and then we can point people to it. And that will be great for everyone." I said, "Thank you so much. I would really love to do a talk. But I've actually found out about this thing called the glass cliff. It's a chapter in my book, and it's not the main thing, but I think it's really interesting and I think there's something there. There's some story I'd like to tell there." And they said, "Yep, that sounds fine, but we really would like this allyship talk from you, please."
It was a real risk, because there was every possibility that they'd say, "We've asked you to do this talk about this thing. If you don't want to do that, we'll find someone else who does." But instead, they said, "We have never had a woman talk about business."
HN: Wow [laughs]
SW: So, this was TEDxLondon. And they said, "Ted overall has hardly had any Black women talk about business. So, you'd be a first, and we don't know really what the audience for this is." I was like, "Well, I can't change my very light-skinned Blackness [laughs], and I can't change my woman-ness, but this is what I know about. I was the chief operating officer, chief financial officer. I've held these really high-level positions, and as an autistic person, I think very much in business terms anyway." And so I was like, "I want to take a risk. I want to do this talk." That led me to doing more and more research and trying to condense the whole story of the glass cliff into a 12-minute thing that I can remember without note cards and not embarrass myself doing.
They took that risk on me, and that was great. Only five TEDxLondon talks have ever been upgraded to be full talks, full TED Talks featured on the TED website, and mine was one of them. That was really exciting for me, and that showed me that there was an audience for it. And then really quickly, that talk got to 1.5 million views and then businesses started reaching out and then individuals started reaching out and people kept being like, "This is happening to me, or this is happening in my business. Or I'm trying to do some succession planning and I'm worried that my business is going to do this, how can I avoid it?"
I started doing more and more talks about the topic. But again, as an autistic person, it remained in the very sort of academic, detached way. I thought that the way other people would be interested would also be in this sort of academic, detached, like, "Oh, isn't this an interesting phenomenon” way. What I found was all of these amazing women were coming to me and saying, "This is happening to me." It wasn't a detached, separate, interesting theory. It was something they were struggling with in their lives. They had been made to feel like failures. They had been made to feel that they weren't good enough or smart enough or ready to take on these roles, and so they were failing within them.
And so when they learned about the glass cliff and what a business is likely to be like before they arrive and the challenges they're likely to face within that tenure, they were suddenly able to realise that it wasn't them. They were suddenly able to find some comfort and some community. And so when I finally realised that this wasn't this detached, academic thing, but this thing that was impacting real people's real lives, I wrote a proposal for the book. I wrote the proposal in, I think, two days, sent it out, got my offers, and then I wrote the entire book in 20 days, just, like, sitting down, researching and writing and putting it together. Because I suddenly realised just how important and personal it was to people and how isolated these people feel and how they've been made to feel that they're failures and they're not. I really wanted to be part of making a resource that people could read and share and warn one another about and use as a friend.
When you feel so sad and when you feel as though you've been set up for failure or when you feel as though you've been set up just to be a normal person in a role and suddenly everything feels against you, it's hard I think not to take that personally. It's hard not to think, "What have I done here?" And so it felt like an opportunity to create comfort and community for people. And so that's where the book came from.
HN: What can businesses and women do to guard against or gain support or challenge these positions that are risky or potential glass cliff scenarios? How can women and businesses change that?
SW: I think businesses have to be active in this. I think businesses have to recognise when you are bringing someone into a risky position. I did a talk at the Southbank Centre as part of the Women of the World Festival. When we finished the talk, a hand went up and it was from someone who worked in HR at the Globe Theatre, and she was saying, "We're doing our succession planning, we're going to bring in a new CEO soon, and this has helped me to reframe what we need to be aware of here." And I'm really lucky, her name's Charlotte Cohen, and she does the audio extra feature for the audiobook version of The Glass Cliff. But she was able to come to that session and tell me what learning about the glass cliff had done for her and for the business. She'd been able to go and say, "I think we have only had male CEOs in the past, and we are in a slightly sticky situation at the moment, and we really risk creating a glass cliff scenario for whoever we bring in next. And so what can we do as a business to safeguard against that?"
So, they were really intentional about building community for the role. They were really intentional about putting in support systems in the role. They were really intentional about saying to the person who they brought in, who was a woman, "We are aware that this could be a potential glass cliff scenario. What supports do you feel that you need the most in order to be successful?" And so in having that open dialogue, they were able to not wait for her to feel herself getting pushed ever closer. They were able from the interview stage before they even offered the job to say, "Here are some risks that we see. How do you feel about them, and what would you like to do about them? What would be helpful for you?" And so I think businesses taking that responsibility is really great.
Then for women, I think part of what we can do is we can reassess our ideas of success. Like, does success really have to look like a corner office? Because to me, it doesn't. I don't want to go to an office, I don't want to wear anything that's got a really solid waistband. I want to wear stretchy clothes on my sofa, and I can work really well from there. I think women are, especially post-2020, women are making more demands of their businesses, the businesses that they work for. They're saying, "This is what I want, this is what I need." And we find that women are saying they want flexibility. They want to be able to work in the ways that they want, from the places that they want. They want to feel that their work has purpose and meaning. And we find that people would be willing to sacrifice huge swathes of their salary for work that always felt meaningful.
So, businesses need to be aware of what women want because part of the reason that we continue to see glass cliff scenarios is women, when they're in a vacuum, they're more likely to fall off the edge of their own glass cliff. But there's something happening at the moment called The Great Breakup. You might have heard of The Great Resignation, but The Great Breakup is seeing women choosing to leave businesses at a higher rate than we've ever seen. And that means at the moment that for every woman who is brought in to a senior leadership role, admittedly in the US, two women are leaving those roles.
HN: Right.
SW: We continue to run at a shortfall because we're bringing women into these risky scenarios and instead of taking it on the chin now, more and more women are saying, "I don't want this. This doesn't work for me. Why would I do this?" And so it has to be this dialogue, otherwise we find businesses being left without the talent that they need and women taking on these dream roles and either really suffering in silence or finding that this dream role has become a bit more of a nightmare. It's a really terrible position to put people in.
I think women also are now more comfortable, and I think it's really helpful in overcoming the glass cliff, that women are now more comfortable saying before they even take on a role, "Well, this seems risky. What are you doing to protect me?" I think us having more autonomy, feeling more able to say, "I know you'd like me to do this, but why do you think I would like to do this for you?" I think restructuring that power balance is really valuable, but also really scary, right? When you're interviewing for a role, saying, "What have you done here?" it can feel really scary, but I think it feels less scary than taking it on silently, and then just suffering. I think the more we can have those conversations, and the earlier we can have those conversations, the better outcomes we're getting for women.
HN: Well, thank you so much, Sophie. This has been so interesting, and I feel like it's a phenomenon that people are going to read about, be shocked about, listen to and relate to. So, thank you so much.
SW: Thank you so much for having me.
HN: Thanks for listening to Audible Sessions. If you enjoyed this and you want to hear more, search Audible Sessions on the Audible website or on the app. The Glass Cliff, written and narrated by Sophie Williams, published by Macmillan, is available to listen to on Audible now.
