Research shows women are often given top positions in firms already on the rocks. Their chances of success are thus skewed, writes Gerald Flynn.

The "glass cliff" awaits many high-performing women

A few years ago, I accompanied a colleague to her graduation at Trinity College Dublin. As we gathered at the exam hall steps in Front Square, her 15 fellow graduate students, many with camera-wielding parents or spouses in tow, congratulated one another on getting through the tough MSc management course and admired the robes hired for the event.

My colleague approached one of the professors in the portico and asked why the four women in the graduating class had been supplied with impressive mortar boards but none of the men. A clearly delighted professor beamed, edged closer to her and gently tapped his index finger on the mortar-board headgear, commenting: "They're only for the ladies so that they do not hurt their pretty little heads on the glass ceiling, my dear."

My colleague, who I had seen make corporate lawyers from London cower, gave a thin smile and icily replied: "Yes, how very appropriate, professor." Her three female colleagues did not take it in quite the same spirit and each round of gin and tonics later in the Pavilion Bar was interspersed with curses against the patronising professor, his academic colleagues and senior male managers in general.

These women have since all broken through the "glass ceiling" and hold either senior management positions or have taken financial packages and launched their own businesses.

But those women who make it to executive director or management-board level, whether by dint of smashing their way through the "glass ceiling" or benefiting from some benign tokenism, have other challenges ahead of them.

Research commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) suggests that the more women a company has appointed to very senior management, the more likely it is heading towards going bust. Yes sisters, don't shoot the messenger. And no brothers, it is not due to some feminine incompetence at the top.

A study by Ryan and Haslam (2005) into FTSE 100 companies that appointed men to their boards of directors showed that share price performance was relatively stable, both before and after the appointment. However, in a time of general financial downturn in the stock market, companies that appointed a woman had experienced "consistently poor performance" in the months preceding the appointment

The basic problem is that organisations often only promote women, according to the research, in a desperate last throw of the dice. The women, in turn, are expected to make a success of a company of which senior male colleagues have made a mess for some years.

In other words, the women are presented with a tougher corporate turnaround challenge and not surprisingly, many fail to salvage an already doomed situation. The business closes, or is taken over, and the most recent female managers get the blame and get to fall - or be shoved - over the "glass cliff".

This leaves female senior executives with a form of hidden discrimination which leaves them more likely to fail than their male counterparts.

The CIPD commissioned Exeter University to carry out the research, Women in the Boardroom: the Risks of being at the Top, which exposes the hidden problems that employers face in increasing the number of women in senior jobs. The researchers found that:

• Women are more readily appointed to tough jobs that are perceived to lead to make-or-break outcomes in terms of career success, than men.
• In crisis situations, business leaders are more inclined to open up job opportunities to women, leaving women business managers at greater risk of failing than their male colleagues working at the same levels.

According to Dianah Worman, CIPD diversity adviser, "female leaders are all too often set up to fail. Due to limited opportunities open to female managers, many are forced to take the more difficult jobs in organisations with a history of poor performance, perpetuating the myth that women are poor performers in senior positions, and covering up the true extent of discrimination for the most desirable senior management positions.

"But the growth in the number of successful small businesses owned by women goes some way to indicating their business and leadership capabilities and highlights the talent other large organisations are missing. So old-fashioned attitudes are not only unfair and discriminatory towards women but they leave organisations shooting themselves in the foot."

Worman added that it is in the best interests of business to take action to enable achievement rather than sitting back and hoping for the best - organisations need to open their doors to the leadership capabilities of both halves of the population, regardless of the performance of the organisation.

"Being prepared in this way will give employers access to a larger pool of talent and enable them to select the best person for the job, regardless of sex, and go some way to help organisations to avoid crisis situations or navigate them better when they do."

The Exeter University report supports Worman's argument that women managers are often set up for failure. It concludes:

• Company performance leading up to the appointment of a director differs according to the gender of the appointee.
• Top-level management is more likely to select the female candidate when the company's performance was said to be declining than when it is improving, according to a business leaders' forum hosted by Exeter University.

In a scenario that involved appointing a financial director to a company, these business leaders were much more likely to see the female candidate as suitable for the position when the organisation was experiencing a marked downturn in performance.

The research findings also underline the notion that the "glass cliff" can be seen as an opportunity. In response to a scenario involving the appointment of a financial director, business leaders believed that a risky situation was seen to provide a male candidate with a much lower quality of opportunity than a non-risky situation. However, the opposite was true for an equally qualified female candidate.

In other words, a woman who can pull off a corporate change or recovery, against the odds, will not only avoid being dumped over the "glass cliff" but may soar to super-corporate heights, if that is the goal to which she really aspires.

Gerald Flynn is an employment specialist with Align Management Solutions in Dublin gflynn@alignmanagement.net