The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: The Glass Cliff
Author: Sophie Williams
Published: March 2024
Genre: Non-Fiction
Themes: Business, Race & Gender,

One sentence summary: An analysis of The Glass Cliff and how it is far from a phenomenon, but the reality for many.

One sentence review: A necessary read for all corporate women.

Review:

What happens to women once they’ve broken through the glass ceiling at work? They are faced with The Glass Cliff.

If you’ve read Millennial Black by Williams, you’ll already know that her writing style and capacity for examining women in the workplace is second to none; she’s made a thoroughly researched book easy to absorb and understand. The Glass Cliff is no different.

The glass cliff, now proven to not just be a phenomenon, is what women are often faced with at senior management level: an exciting opportunity to lead is presented, however the reality is a little more murky – a company in need of rescue, perhaps without the support of shareholders.. it’s the perfect set up for failure.

Using research from across the globe and including as many intersections as possible (which isn’t as often as we’d like), Williams explains what the glass cliff is, how it came about and how we overcome it.

Williams emulates what it feels like to be a woman in a majority male workforce perfectly – the frequent micro aggressions, the emotional burden of accepting these and continuing anyway, it’s perfect. She says “Sometimes microaggressions make us feel, implicitly, that we don’t belong in a space”.

She also hits the nail on the head when she suggests flexibility is perhaps more important to women as the chance to work from home means we don’t have to deal with the aforementioned microaggressions. Working from home can mean “finding relief in not having to wear a mask of ‘professionalism’ that was made in someone else’s image”. This rings so true for me, I often having to put on a mask, a persona, a façade at work.

Honestly, my neck is sore from nodding along to this book. I feel 100% seen.

Huge thank you to Sophie Williams for the proof copy of this, honoured you reached out to me.

The Glass Cliff is out now and if I couldn’t tell already, I absolutely would recommend this book to you. You can check it out at Bookshop.org through my affiliate link here.