Are Female Executives Over‐represented in Precarious Leadership Positions?
| Author | John D. Leeth,Susan M. Adams,Atul Gupta |
| Published date | 01 March 2009 |
| Date | 01 March 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2007.00549.x |
Are Female Executives Over-represented in
Precarious Leadership Positions?
Susan M. Adams, Atul Gupta and John D. Leeth
Bentley College, Waltham, MA 02452, USA
Corresponding author email: agupta@bentley.edu
We use a sample of CEO appointments at US corporations over the years 1992–2004 to
test the ‘glass cliff’ hypothesis, which posits that females are appointed to leadership
positions at firms that are in a precarious financial condition. Our analysis utilizes three
measures of stock-price-based financial performance and two distinct control samples of
appointments of males to the CEO position. We find that corporate performance
preceding CEO appointments tends to favor females, implying that females (males) are
appointed to the CEO position largely at times when the firm is in relatively better
(worse) financial health. Disaggregating the data by appointments in up versus down
markets, at high-risk versus low-risk firms, and by calendar time yield similar
conclusions. There appears to be no glass cliff facing female CEOs at US firms. Our
findings suggest a need for additional research to identify where and for what types of
positions this phenomenon is prevalent.
Introduction
Over the last two decades women have made slow
but steady inroads into the ranks of senior
corporate executives, confirming the presence of
growing cracks in the so-called ‘glass ceiling’
(Adams et al., 2007; Davidson and Cooper, 1992;
Dreher, 2003; Goodman, Fields and Blum, 2003;
Stroh, Langlands and Simpson, 2004). At firms
comprising the S&P 1500, however, the number
of female CEOs has only increased from 1 in 1992
to 61 in 2004 (Adams et al., 2007), confirming
that women are under-represented and perhaps
disadvantaged in leadership positions (Adler,
2000).
Ryan and Haslam (2005a, 2005b, 2007) argue
that female leaders are in fact over-represented in
precarious leadership positions; suggested rea-
sons for the phenomenon include sexism and
in-group bias, group dynamics and implicit
leadership expectations. In particular, Ryan and
Haslam (2005a) report on an explicit test of the
hypothesis that women are appointed to more
precarious leadership positions compared to men.
For a sample of 19 appointments of females to
boards of directors at FTSE 100 firms in 2003,
they document that appointments of women
(men) are more likely to follow consistently bad
(stable) stock price performance over the preced-
ing five months. They interpret this finding as
evidence that female executives are on a ‘glass
cliff’, in that they are over-represented in
precarious leadership positions.
The possibility of a glass cliff constitutes
another barrier to the advancement of women
into leadership positions, in addition to gender-
based differences in preferences and ability plus
possible gender-based discrimination. The litera-
ture suggests that workers tend to prefer male
supervision (Simon and Landis, 1989), female
leaders receive a lot more scrutiny than males
(Eagly, Karau and Makhijani, 1995) and women
leaders are perceived as being less effective than
men (Bowen, Swim and Jacobs, 2000; Eagly and
Karau, 2002; Eagly, Makhijani and Klonsky,
1992; Heilman, 2001; Schein, 2001). Such barriers
to advancement may make female executives
more willing to accept challenging and perhaps
more precarious positions. This can lead them to
British Journal of Management, Vol. 20, 1–12 (2009)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2007.00549.x
r2007 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford
OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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