Are women lawyers given more risky or precarious leadership positions?
Based on their recent archival and experimental research, Ryan and Halsam (2004) have extended the metaphors of the glass ceiling’ and the glass elevator’ to include the glass cliff’. They suggest that women are likely to find themselves on top of a glass cliff’ in that they are appointed to leadership positions in problematic organisational circumstances, which are risky and precarious. This paper presents an experimental study ( N =58) investigating the glass cliff phenomenon in a legal setting, in which participants chose a candidate to lead a defence team for a legal case which was either risky or non-risky. Commensurate with Ryan and Halsam’s (2004) previous findings, the results of the study provide further empirical replication of the glass cliff, and also illustrate that the phenomenon does generalise beyond the business and political arenas to a legal setting. This study also sheds some more light on the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon through the way participant’s evalua
