Female CEO selection: Does the glass cliff exist?

Abstract

This paper revisits the glass cliff phenomenon in corporate spheres, which asserts that women predominantly advance into leadership roles in precarious times, when the chance of failure is highest. Compared to prior studies, we greatly expand the sample of female CEO appointments by extending our sample in time and breadth. Moreover, we address confounding effects and explore heterogeneous and non-linear relationships. Using a variety of accounting- and market-based variables to proxy for precarious situations, our results do not provide clear evidence of a glass cliff effect in US corporations, implying that earlier findings may have been specific to the samples and methods used.