An Uncovered Bias About Women in Business

Diving into gender bias, women in business and the metaphor of "the glass cliff," Professor Raina Brands opens up an executive-workplace conversation about an overlooked bias linked to discrimination and inequality.

Professor Raina Brands

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

You know, it just occurred to us that yes, we want to keep talking to leaders and managers, but seeing and knowing that nothing was really going to change. They're not really invested in, reducing the amount of bias that women are facing. So we also want to talk directly to women. Women in leadership positions are sometimes teetering on the edge, you know, of a cliff that they can't see. The metaphor of the glass cliff, we see it in a bunch of different domains, acknowledging that what needs to really change is the system and the organization.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Welcome to yet another episode of Voices of a Business School, hosted by AVT Business School. In the studio today, we're pleased to welcome Reina Brantz, professor of organizational behavior and founder of Career Equally, interviewed by AVT's own Jesper Bergman. In this episode, we're diving into the metaphor of what is known as the Glass Cliff. Raina let us in on her expertise in organizational behavior, women in business, and gender bias of the workplace. Raina claims that once you become familiar with the phenomenon of the glass cliff, you will notice it everywhere. We'll uh we'll let you be the judge of that after this episode. But for now, thanks for tuning in and let's dive into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

We are here today with Raina Brands, who has the most cool name I've ever heard about. But you're actually from Australia. You will hear her voice in uh just a minute. But where about did you actually grow up in Australia?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

I grew up in Brisbane, Queensland, which is a city halfway up the east coast of Australia, so very far from London where I live, and very far from Copenhagen. I'm a long way from home. No, so I I did my undergraduate and master's in psychology uh in Brisbane, Australia. This is very strange to many Europeans and Americans, but in Australia most people don't go away for university. So I lived at home as an undergraduate, you know, going to classes at a university near my house. It's very normal to do that.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

And choosing your main area of study, how how did you come about that?

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Well, when I uh was leaving high school, at that point you just come out with a with a rank, basically a rank with all exiting students, and it's a number from one to 25, and that dictates what course you can get into. So there's a big thick book full of all the university courses you can do. I just went through it and crossed out courses until I it was down to law or psychology, and I thought law would be pretty boring. So that's how I chose psychology. You know, it's not a particularly uh thoughtful origin story, but I loved it. It's a very broad discipline, much broader than most people think. I was very happy to devote six years of life to studying it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Great. You also were working afterwards, your masters in Australia?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yeah, that's right. So to call it to call yourself a psychologist in Australia, you have to do, well, I don't know what it is now, but at the time you had to do at least six years of study. So after my undergraduate, I started doing a masters in organizational psychology, and at the same time started working as a as a consultant. You know, those few years of of working as a consultant kind of cured me of that life. It certainly wasn't for me. I'd always wanted to do a PhD from pretty much from when I found out there was such a thing as a PhD when I was about eight years old. I'd always wanted to get a doctorate. Yeah, so while I was while I was consulting, that that call back to academia got stronger and stronger. Uh and eventually I listened to it.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

So, how come did you decide to move all the way to the UK for that?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

I think I just had a sense that I wanted to go to prestigious university. So I started looking around for programs in the US and the UK. I decided I wanted to be in the UK and the business school at Cambridge, Judge Business School, I really liked the masters they were offering. I wanted the opportunity to explore something beyond psychology, so the masters I took was in strategy, innovation, organization, so thinking about more of those organizational issues. I ended up staying there for quite a while. I uh went there after my masters. I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to do my PhD, and fortunate enough that a world leader in the topic I now study are social networks and organizations, joined the school just after I started my PhD, and so I had probably the most eminent expert in the in the world at the school available to supervise me. I was very lucky.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Is that still your main passion?

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Yeah, so now I uh so I love I love psychology. I think it's such a powerful lens in so many situations. You know, and I I'd always all of my research had been done on gender, so gender stereotyping, particularly in the workplace. I think for me, just the individual focus of psychology, it just wasn't enough. It didn't answer all my questions. And when I arrived at Cambridge, I was looking for another lens. And when I was introduced to social networks by a very loud marketing professor from Australia who was working at Cambridge, he gave me a book to read on social networks. And as soon as I read it, I was like, this is this is the thing I've been looking for. In my academic life, I still use both. Social networks is much more of a sociological tradition, but in my research, I blend psychological theories with this structural social networks approach.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

So after you finished your PhD, you also worked at Judge Business School?

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Right, so I did my PhD there and then I was fortunate enough to get a research associate position. Uh then I joined London Business School, and last year I joined University College London School of Management.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

You've also founded career equally.com where you have posted a number of different articles with research about equality. And I was really keen when I read the The Glass Cliff because I've not heard about the Glass Cliff before. And it's really interesting also to read your statement about why you actually founded this to educate and empower women and the leaders they work for to de-bias their careers. You know, coming from your background, studying social networks, but then also this bit. You know, how did that happen?

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Yeah, so this was the brainchild of one of my friends and collaborators in academia, Anitha Rattan. So I think we, you know, we worked quite closely together as collaborators, and obviously closely together when we were both at London Business School. We were having very similar experiences. So obviously, we both research gender, so we're very immersed in the literature about uh all the different ways in which women experience discrimination and bias and stereotyping in the workplace. This is all very clear to us. And we were having a very similar experience in that it was typically the women in the executive MVAs who are just a little bit older, perhaps uh getting to that into their first or second leadership role, and they would come into our office and they would they would describe experiences to us that were very clearly biased, stereotyping, that they hadn't framed in that way. For them, it was just a really confusing experience. So experience is like I've always been such a top performer, and now suddenly, suddenly there's doubt. People have always liked me, and suddenly people are telling me I need to tone, change my style or tone it down. And this is a very confusing experience when you first start to encounter this as a woman, it is very confusing. For Anitra and I, it's not confusing at all. We know exactly what is happening, you know, because we have all the frames and the academic models and the academic research that we know this happens to women all the time. We know why it's happening, we know what sort of stereotypes they're they're violating and what sort of pushback they're getting. So we're having that experience a lot, and then we're also having this experience of often having the opportunity to talk to leaders and managers and organizations about what they were doing and giving them advice and seeing and knowing that nothing was really going to change, you know, that they're not really invested in reducing the amount of bias that women are facing. You know, it just occurred to us that yes, we want to keep talking to leaders and managers, but we also want to talk directly to women. This sort of thing is not typically part of a business school education. Uh, it's certainly not part of core business school education. You can get it in some popular books, you know, watered down in lots of anecdotes or opinion. We just saw a real gap, uh, a real need to tell women or give women frames for the experiences they were having, um, help them understand what research and evidence says about what biases they they face and you know as much as possible with without you know blaming them or telling them they needed to fix themselves, but what are some tools and tactics you can use uh to reduce reduce some of the biases you face, acknowledging that what needs to really change is the system and the organization.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Alright, so you can read more about that on korearequally.com and we will talk about the um the glass cliff because that was one bias that I hadn't come across when when when I was reading about it. So would you just describe what what you mean by a glass cliff?

SPEAKER_00 9:07

Right, so we have all heard of the metaphor of the glass ceiling. So this is the idea that women can only progress so highly in an organization and suddenly you know they can see they can see where they want to go, they can see other other people, usually men getting there, but they seem to be stuck behind this invisible barrier. So the metaphor of the glass cliff, which is not coined by me or Anitha, this is the research of uh Michelle Ryan. So this metaphor is the I is the idea that uh women in leadership positions are sometimes teetering on the edge of a cliff that they can't see. And so what her research has found is that women are often promoted to risky leadership positions where there is a really high chance of failure. And in in fact, we prefer, when the situation is risky, we prefer a woman leader. It's because the that situation cues a different set of expectations in us about who's going to succeed. So typically, when we think about leadership, we think about men. Think man, think manager. And that's because we think that the skills leaders need, you know, to be directive, authoritative, these are things we stereotypically associate with men. When we're in a crisis situation, we think, and we, I mean people in general think, well, actually, in this situation, we need somebody who can really draw people together, better people management skills, and these are things that we stereotypically associate with women. Yeah, so you know, the ability to be communal and draw people together and foster cohesion. That stereotyped expectation really favors women in this situation. Of course, the problem is these are risky leadership positions, so women often fail. Um and it's a incredibly robust effect. It doesn't just happen in organizations, we also see that you know, in political races, women are often asked by their parties to stand for elections in you know seats that are very difficult to win. So we see it in a bunch of different domains.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

So what do women then, if they don't see this glass cliff, I mean, what's your advice then to to the women who might be put in these risky positions and they think, okay, I got I got I got the job.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Right. So what is our advice for women? So when you're offered a leadership role, you know, our first advice is you really interrogate the position. So make sure you really understand the history, you know, how the position has come about, who what who is the last incumbent in it, what is the team or organization facing. So if you really interrogate the role, you can get a sense of how risky it is. If it is, if you you know, if it is a really risky position, if then you maybe you want to think twice about taking it. Another piece of advice that is always good advice is to improve your Batner, and your Batner is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So whenever you're in a job negotiation, the more offers you have and the better those offers are, research shows, the better is the offer you'll finally negotiate. Uh so if you are looking, if you're offered a leadership position in the context of a job search, you know, the more jobs you have to choose from, the less likely it is you'll feel like you have to take this risky leadership position. And then the final piece of advice we offer is that look, sometimes you might just feel like you need to take this, right? So the because the problem with the glass cliff is it's a catch-22. If you don't take it, you're stuck behind the glass ceiling. And if you do take it, you might fail. So if you think that, you know, on balance, it's better just to get this leadership position on your CV, get out from behind the glass ceiling, okay. But then you need to really create a strong narrative for yourself right from the beginning. So really socialise your decision and the risks that you see. Continue to socialize the risks and the obstacles that you face. And so that way, if unfortunately you don't succeed in the position, at least you're not trying to kind of retrospectively socialise or what would be seen as making excuses for your failure.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Great, great advice. And you can read again a lot more about it on um careerequally.com. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

And we've also we've we've just started partnering with organizations to offer offer workshops on this topic.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Perfect. So do you feel like there's any movement from from also when you started your career in in a sense to to where we are today?

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Yes, there is, yes, there's always movement and there's always progress. And from when I came of age and started my career to now, I think the the big difference I see is just a willingness of both women and men to call out bias when we see it. So things like the Me Too movement, there's such a contrast to the kind of culture that I I came of age in. And it's really heartening to see, actually. Yeah, it does make me feel a lot better about the world. I think having said that, if you look at the history of any social movement, including uh women's women's rights, you know, it's always push and pull between progress and regression. You know, I think what we see in the United States is a huge pushback against women's rights and a whole bunch of other other groups' rights as well. So I think there's always push and pull and there's always uh progress, progress coupled with with pullback.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

Is there any particular change that you like to see in the future?

SPEAKER_00 14:14

I do actually. I mean, one of the things I'm thinking a lot about in my research at the moment is how the structure of the home life affects the kind of careers that women have. And you know, I've had a couple of viral tweets recently. An irritated thread about, you know, my daycare always calling me and not and not my partner, you know, unexpectedly went viral, and I did a bunch of uh interviews with the bunch of different journalists, and the frame is about women and well, how can we support women to have the careers they want? And one of the things I always try and reframe is this is not just about the women, actually. Yes, I want women to have rewarding careers that are equal to that of you know equally competent and capable capable men, but I also want men to have equally rewarding home lives and family lives. And the current structure, which is kind of more of a traditional breadwinner model where the man earns the woman does all the child care or most of the childcare, you know, that's a trap for men too. They don't get all the joy you have when you have a child. So when I'm talking about equality, I'm not just talking about women's equality in the workplace, I'm also talking about men's equality in the home. And that's not just about sharing chores and responsibilities, it's also about you know sharing in the relationship and the joy and the participation. That's my wish.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

Thank you very much.