Based on some recent anecdotes, it seems women can often be put into CEO or similar roles only when a company is facing danger. Often these women are subject to intense public and internal scrutiny and don’t receive the level of cooperation and support from their employees that you might expect a man in a similar position to garner.
Heighten scrutiny involves Activist investors more likely to target women-lead companies (Oluo).
So when Jill Abramson was promoted to executive editor of the New York Times, it was, sadly, a big deal. Many, myself included, took Abramson’s promotion as a sign of positive change in the publishing world. And when she was publicly and abruptly fired just two years later, many of us realized that maybe she—and the rest of us—had been set up. When you can’t keep women out anymore, and you can’t force them all to become secretaries or teachers because modern social politics demand that you at least pretend to support gender equality in the workplace, what can you do to keep women out of powerful positions in business? You can set them up to fail—or, to be more accurate, you set them up to fall. It’s called the glass cliff, and it’s a phrase that was first coined in 2005 by University of Exeter researchers Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam. — Mediocre, pg 154
After all that struggle, women have to jump at fraught and risk-filled leadership positions at failing companies because they know those are likely the only chances they’ll get. Once at the top, they have to battle a team of white male managers who suddenly don’t feel like working as hard as they used to. They have to find a way to be a “strong leader” while also not seeming like a “bitch.” They have to battle to push forward every change they were brought in to make, no matter how incremental. And through it all the news articles documenting their efforts will focus on their appearance, their voice, their age. When we look at the treatment of women in business and in business leadership, how Abramson, Pao, and Mayer fared in their jobs will probably not come as a surprise. — Mediocre, pg 158
When Pao resigned she was replaced by Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman. He didn’t roll back the changes that Pao had implemented—the ones that apparently had caused so much outrage with Redditors—and yet, for some mysterious reason, the outrage ended. The protests stopped; the popular subreddits were taken out of their private settings. There wasn’t an influx of new subreddits titled “r/ SteveHuffmanIsACunt.” Soon Facebook and Twitter would also take steps to remove abusive accounts from their platforms, and yet the widespread uprising against their male CEOs that Pao had faced never materialized. And even though the ambitious user goals Reddit had set were apparently so important that failure to meet them would have forced Pao to resign, it took Reddit over three years after she left to reach the half-billion monthly-user goal they set for her in 2015. — Mediocre, pg 160