Soon after President Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president on Sunday, Google reported that searches for the term “glass cliff” had tripled. This was far from a coincidence. Many are familiar with “the glass ceiling,” a term first coined by writer Marilyn Loden in 1978 to describe the invisible barrier faced by women as they try to advance to senior leadership positions.
(Loden used it in a speech before the Women's Action Alliance, a feminist organization based in New York.) The term gained greater ground in the 1980s, a decade that saw women entering the workforce en masse. “Women have reached a certain point—I call it the glass ceiling,” Gay Bryant, an editor of magazine, told in 1984.
“They’re in the top of middle management, and they’re stopping and getting stuck.” Soon, specific variations caught on in different industries: “the marble ceiling,” for example, is used for those in politics. Forty-six years later, more and more occupational minorities are breaking through the glass ceiling.
(Still not enough, though: According to a , white women only make up 22% of employees in the C-Suite. Women of color make up six percent.) The glass cliff is a metaphor for what happens next.
What is the glass cliff? “The glass cliff refers to the tendency to promote white women and men and women of color to highly visible leadership roles during times of crisis or scandal,” says Utah State University Professor of Sociology.