Women in business face the "glass cliff"

EXETER (Reuters) - Women are increasingly breaking though the glass ceiling to get seats on company boards but only to find themselves teetering on the edge of the glass cliff, a leading psychologist says.


Alex Haslam said research showed women were often only appointed to senior managerial jobs in firms that were in trouble -- and even then to precarious positions -- and that once business picked up again, the gender doors closed once more.


"Women are breaking through the glass ceiling ... but the jobs are often a poisoned chalice," the Professor of Social Psychology at Exeter University, told reporters on Monday.


"In all the studies we have done, we have never not found evidence of the glass cliff," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.


The phenomenon was not confined to any one profession or social group, but could be found across the business spectrum.


In the legal profession, for example, women were often given the harder cases or those in which it was known that it would be difficult to extract payment from the client.


"It is a really interesting phenomenon ... applicable to all minority groups" Haslam said.


Men were seen generally as being very good when everything was going well, but that women had the upper hand in a crisis.


However, once the crisis was past, women tended to find themselves not only isolated but also having a struggle to hang on to their jobs compared to their male colleagues.


Research had shown that women were well aware of the phenomenon and had ample anecdotal evidence to support it, Haslam said, but that by and large men were in denial.

link : http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040906/80/f2018.html