Celia Walden

Are you familiar with the glass cliff ?

I don’t believe being goaded into a state of perma-grievance is helpful

‘Most of us are familiar with the glass ceiling… but are you familiar with the glass cliff?”

Now, that’s a heart-sinker of a sentence. And when I came across it yesterday, in a piece about “the women who are left to take charge at times of crisis”, I felt pre-emptively wearied by the notion that there was some new or imagined female obstacle to feel aggrieved about. Nevertheless, I read on. Because if vague (but presumably male) nefarious forces are going to try to trip me up professionally, I should be forearmed.

It turns out that the glass cliff is a sort of secondary attempt to sabotage the careers of women impudent enough to have broken through the glass ceiling in the first place. Although it’s not quite clear who’s doing the sabotaging, my instinct was right in that it’s generally perceived to be some sort of amorphous male entity.

“The metaphor speaks to the fact that the leadership positions given to women are disproportionately risky and precarious because they are more likely to occur in times of crisis,” we’re told. In other words, women are set up to fail. By handing them turkeys large enough to guarantee they stagger backwards off cliffs, men can ensure the “told-you-she-couldn’t-handle-the-pressure” narrative continues to be propagated until the end of time. If you’re picturing Theresa May in kitten heels, tottering into a Brexit-shaped abyss right now, you’ve got the idea.

Also on the slide is the number of female FTSE 100 CEOS, which fell this year to six, after Moya Greene stepped down as chief executive of the Royal Mail. The number of women at the top of blue-chip companies is now so small that they are outnumbered by male bosses called Steve.

All of which suggests that Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, the University of Exeter academics who coined “glass cliff ” in 2005, were on to something. So why does the idea that women in power are being used as frontier scapegoats still not quite ring true?

Today, the Hampton alexander Review, which aims to increase the number of women on FTSE

350 boards, publishes its annual report. Its findings suggest more than 100 leading companies have achieved – or exceeded – the target of having one in three board positions held by women, with a further 50 “well on their way”.

Where does that leave Ryan’s suggestion, on BBC Radio 4’s World at One yesterday, that May was only given the reins of the Conservative Party after the Brexit vote because the men “didn’t want to be embroiled in that type of crisis”? Because that reminds me of the rumour that Obama was only “allowed” to win the 2008 election because they

knew the financial crash was coming, the theory being that it was OK to have a black president because he was doomed to fail. And then we’re getting dangerously close to conspiracy theorising.

That there’s a glass ceiling

– still – is without question.

And, yes, women like May,

Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir were given power in times of crisis. But to suggest that they and their female counterparts in global business were only allowed to break through that ceiling in order to be blamed for the mistakes of their male predecessors would imply that the people (men, again – always men…) dooming them to failure were happy to see the political party, company or venture fail. How likely is that?

There’s also the question of skewed data. With women historically new to business and politics, studies like these are never going to be accurate. We’re still at the stage where we’re looking for reasons that some women have broken through glass ceilings – and reasons they haven’t always triumphed once there. As the situation normalises, I hope that kind of dissection will stop. It won’t be necessary, for one thing, and, far more importantly, it’s unhelpful.

Over the weekend, I refused to read any of the “ladies, you’re now working for free for the rest of the year” articles about Equal Pay Day, not because I don’t see the raging injustice in the gender pay gap, but because I don’t believe being goaded into a state of perma-grievance is helpful either as a mindset or in order to effect change.

Pay discrimination, job segregation and a lack of women in senior posts are just some of the very real problems we face in professional life. So creating punchy-sounding, semi-invisible new obstacles for women to overcome seems a vaguely pointless activity – and buying into the “glass cliff ” rhetoric even more so.