Clara Fang: Women of Color and the Glass Cliff
Photo: Joel Swick / Unsplash
Editor’s note: this is an excerpt of a peice by Clara Fang and colleague Illyasha Peete, originally published by Green Tara Consulting.
When President Biden decided to end his campaign for re-election, Vice President Kamala Harris was propelled to the position of de-facto nominee overnight. So far her campaign has been a brilliant success, with record breaking fundraising and rising poll numbers. However, before it all happened came a lot of handwringing. There was concern that she was an underperforming Vice President, she was more unpopular than Joe Biden, America couldn’t elect a Black and South-Asian woman, etc. Some called her a “DEI candidate.”
Kamala Harris’ experience is not an outlier for women of color in leadership positions. Despite being more than qualified, concerns would linger about her background. Usually she is brought in to turn around an organization in crisis. But if she is not supported or equipped to fix the situation, she is blamed for the failure. Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam at University of Exeter termed this phenomenon “the glass cliff,” where women and people of color are elevated to leadership roles when there is a crisis, putting them in a situation where they are highly likely to fail.
According to the 2023 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey, women of color make up only 6% of C-Suite leaders in corporate America and Canada. The disparity starts at the entry level where only 72% of women of color are promoted to manager, compared to 93% of white women and 99% of men of color, and the attrition continues at every step of the ladder. The nonprofit sector is no better. In a study of 2,488 environmental nonprofits in the U.S., 92% of CEOs were white, compared to only 8% people of color.
For this article, I spoke with several women of color about their experience of the glass cliff, the consequences of being pushed out, and what organizations and companies can do to help them thrive and truly advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
I use the pronoun “we” throughout the piece because I include myself among the women of color, and names have been replaced with pseudonyms to protect their identity.
