Julia Carreon didn’t anticipate that a LinkedIn post promoting her new book would spark an exchange that made a persuasive case for why she wrote the book in the first place.
Carreon, a former executive at Citigroup and Wells Fargo, had drawn on her experience climbing the ranks of Wall Street to write Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling, which was published in September. The book touched on the notion of the “glass cliff,” a term that academics use to capture how women tend to be appointed to leadership positions when a company is going through a rough patch.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Carreon’s friend talked about an example of the glass cliff, using it as an opportunity to highlight her book. Carreon was taken aback when Chris Bradley, a senior partner at McKinsey, commented on the post—and questioned the entire premise of the glass cliff.
As Bloomberg first reported this week, McKinsey has sought to distance itself from Bradley’s comments. “This exchange was inconsistent with our views and the standards we expect,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Fast Company. “The comments were made in a personal capacity and have since been deleted. We stand by our research and leadership on these topics. We are disappointed by these comments and do not endorse them.” (Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.)
To Carreon, it seemed so far-fetched that anyone would make these remarks publicly—no less a leader at McKinsey—that she initially assumed it was a joke. “I wasn’t understanding that he didn’t know that the glass cliff was a thing,” she tells Fast Company. “It finally hit me in real time that he thought we made it up for our book.”
Bradley doubled down as Carreon chimed in, writing that “we once had a problem of female advancement to CEO, but now we have a new problem that the jobs they get are too hard? Is this actually a thing?” He went on to say it seemed like a convenient excuse to “always be a victim in the rain.” When Carreon suggested he do some research on the topic, he retorted that it wasn’t worth his time: “I am not going to start researching glass cliffs as I don’t think it ranks in the top 1000 problems of the world.”
This incident is problematic for McKinsey for a number of reasons. Bradley happens to be a director of the firm’s research arm, the McKinsey Global Institute, which has put out research on gender inequality, including across leadership roles. Through other research, McKinsey has shed light on the barriers that persist for women in corporate America; the firm is known for its annual Women in the Workplace report, published in partnership with Sheryl Sandberg’s organization Lean In. The term glass cliff is even cited in a 2020 report from McKinsey about women in healthcare, in the context of discussing the unique challenges women of color may face.
“This is very squarely a black eye over the fact that their senior partners do not live their values,” Carreon says.
But Bradley’s views are not exactly niche. As Michelle Ryan—one of the researchers who fashioned the term “glass cliff”—revealed in a 2007 paper, it’s not unusual for men to minimize the issue or dismiss it outright, much like Bradley did.
“The unspoken reality of the research on barriers to leadership for women is that men have not had to prove themselves to the same degree that women leaders have,” says Christy Glass, a sociology professor at Utah State University who has studied the glass cliff for decades. “I think there’s something deeply threatening [about] anything that suggests that you’ve had it easier than some other people.”
There is, of course, plenty of data that suggests female executives come up against more hurdles. A number of papers, including the work of Ryan and Glass, have concluded that women are more likely to be installed in leadership positions when a company is facing headwinds (though there is some research that contradicts those findings). In her research, Glass has found that once women are appointed to the role, they are given a shorter timeline to turn things around, and they shoulder more blame even when a company’s issues predate their appointment.
Even the public nature of the LinkedIn exchange is rather telling, Glass points out: Bradley was bold enough to make those comments on a social media platform for professionals, in full view of both his employer and women who might report to him.
“Good leadership means evaluating complex evidence, engaging diverse stakeholders, and truly seeking to understand how your organization works and what the landscape looks like—not just for you, but for everybody,” Glass says. “Here’s a person who is this far into a highly visible, high-status leadership role [and] career, and he has never had to face accountability for this kind of behavior before.”
It’s also the kind of misstep that likely would not be afforded to many women who are similarly situated. Women who occupy the highest strata of the corporate world often get there against all odds, Glass says, and they are given less space to make mistakes. It’s not hard to imagine why women at the top of their game still face so many challenges, or why there is still such paltry representation of female CEOs across some of the leading employers in the country. As of this year, about 11% of the CEOs at the 500 largest U.S. companies by revenue are women—a record high.
For Carreon, the exchange with Bradley also called to mind countless experiences she has filed away from her career on Wall Street. (Carreon is currently in the midst of a sexual harassment lawsuit that she brought against her former employer Citigroup, which the company has said has “no merit.”)
“I feel like women are constantly having to relitigate our value,” she says, “and it’s enough already.”