00:00What is the glass cliff? Well, for one, the glass cliff is a very lazy metaphor.
00:14In a time of downturn or in a time of turmoil or when the outgoing CEO does some, like, very
00:23bad man thing,
00:25women and people of color are more likely to be put in charge of firms and companies that are risky.
00:36What happens is that they come up to clean up somebody else's mess.
00:41So, like, I don't know, the glass broom or the glass shovel, maybe?
00:46Hi, I'm Aminatou Sow. I am the co-host of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend.
00:51And today I'm going to be talking about the concept of the glass cliff.
00:57So if you look at Fortune 500 companies, about 5% of them are led by women.
01:03That's, like, kind of shameful. It's, like, 500 CEOs of the 500 best companies that we have.
01:085% women. And the glass cliff comes into play, or the imperfect metaphor,
01:15in the sense that a lot of these women are not empowered or, like, set up to succeed.
01:20When, see, male CEOs have had meltdowns or when they have driven their companies into the ground
01:26or there have been, like, really bad racist things have happened,
01:30women and people of color get brought in because now it's their turn to fix it.
01:35Like, you're essentially not set up to succeed. You are not set up to do your best work.
01:41And there is a sense that you have to clean up somebody's mess before you can really, truly step into
01:49a leadership role.
01:50And we see this over and over and over again.
01:53The first thing that a lot of these companies can do is just, like, hire more women, hire more people
01:58of color,
01:58and put them on the leadership track in a real way.
02:03If you are only promoting women and other marginalized people when you've had something bad happen to your company,
02:09that will stick in our memory. So maybe just promote them in, like, happier times.
02:15It's really important to shift the focus of this question away from what those women can do
02:20and really say, like, what can institutions and what can businesses do so that this doesn't happen anymore.
02:26Really having a pipeline that supports, like, your own inclusion and diversity goals is super important.
02:35So having, you know, like, women being managers, women being real leaders in an organization at every level,
02:43from the bottom to the top, is, like, one way that everybody can feel fully supported.
02:48We should do away with the glass ceiling in 2018. It's unacceptable.
02:53And whatever terrible metaphor we agree that the glass ceiling is also should not exist.
02:59Especially because at this point it is so quantifiable. It is so, like, we feel it, we see it.
03:05These companies should be embarrassed. Stop doing that.
03:07Oh, yeah.
03:09From our الو sei hacer, you know, there.
03:11Zews影mation
