Empathy

In justifying why glass cliffs occur, Ryan and her colleagues provided five causes. First, these are the result of either hostile or benevolent sexism. In the former, people desire to see women fail and attempt to actively disadvantage them or transform them into scapegoats, whereas in the latter they believe that they are doing women a favor by offering them challenges. Second, glass cliffs might be due to in-group favoritism where male executives reserve attractive positions for their in-group members. Third, given women's scarce prospects in upper managerial strata, high-risk leadership positions are among the few opportunities in which they can excel. Fourth, some companies wish to signal change by enacting gender equality. Finally, women are perceived as simply having the necessary socioemotional traits to handle crises. Each of these causes is a form of prejudice and, in times of distress, the authors suggest that people spontaneously engage in "think crisis-think female" or "think crisis-think not male".

In a recent comprehensive review of the literature on glass cliffs, Bruckmüller et al. concluded that these phenomena are indeed determined by multiple causes. To lessen their occurrence, they urged above all that top management cease to associate stereotypically feminine qualities with female leaders and to contrast these with masculine-like ones. This suggests that a principal driver of glass cliffs is the conviction that women are preferred as leaders during crises because they are possibly better equipped to deal with them than men. Although research agrees that this association exists, its nature has not been investigated directly. Women are said to possess crisis-relevant traits, abilities, skills, and behaviors, yet researchers use these terms loosely thereby creating some obfuscation. The same confusion extends to how this advantage has been described. For instance, some have described women leaders as "being understanding," "intuitive," and "tactful", "aware of the feelings of others" and "creative". Others have characterized them as "accentuating partnership" and "adopting empathic relations with subordinates". To explain why these gender-based leader perceptions occur, most concur that perceptions are guided "by broad societal expectations" without asking what led to their formation. We believe that many of the adjectives used to describe women leaders fall under the broader purview of empathy. For example, highly empathic individuals have long been regarded as tactful and imaginative or creative. Empathic accuracy is one's ability to accurately infer another's feelings and it is the aspect of empathy that corresponds to intuition. Lastly, being understanding is central to the empathic experience because it relates to perspective taking, itself a key subdimension of empathy. Therefore, for these reasons, we believe that empathy is germane to understanding why women may be preferentially selected as leaders in times of crisis.