Cracked Ceilings, Shakier Ground: The Paradox of Women’s Leadership in Western Democracy

PHOTO: Sanae Takaichi and Giorgia Meloni in Tokyo for the Italy-Japan summit, Cabinet Public Affairs Office on Wikimedia Commons

Why do women so often reach the highest offices of political power at the most precarious moments? The pattern is striking. Female leaders appear not only as symbols of progress, but as figures stepping into roles defined by instability, division, or looming failure. Their presence at the top is undeniable. The conditions under which they arrive are harder to celebrate.

As of March, 13 of the 193 member states of the United Nations are led by a woman as head of state – a figure that, while still low, is gradually increasing. At first glance, it suggests a world moving, albeit slowly, toward gender equality. But if one looks more closely at the timing, the picture shifts. Women are frequently elevated when parties are fractured, when electoral prospects are dim, and when governing crises have already taken hold. Women are not only underrepresented in leadership, but disproportionately appointed during periods of heightened institutional risk. The story is not simply one of progress. It is one of risk, and of who, repeatedly, is asked to carry it.

This dynamic is captured by the idea of the ‘glass cliff,’ a concept developed to explain why women are more likely to be appointed to leadership roles during periods of turbulence. The term, now being thrown around after the removal of Sussan Ley earlier this year, was originally coined in the context of managerial positions in the private sector. Unlike the ‘glass ceiling’, which describes the barriers preventing women from reaching the top, the cliff describes what happens once they get there. Positions of power are more accessible, but also more precarious. These turbulent positions are less attractive to their male counterparts, and naturally, as leadership positions are fiercely scarce, women – the ‘out group’ – naturally accept such roles.

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This does not diminish the agency or capability of individual women. Nor does it suggest that their achievements are undeserved. On the contrary, the ability to navigate high-risk political environments often demands exceptional skill. But it does complicate the narrative of progress. Advancement is not occurring on neutral terrain. It is shaped by incentives, constraints, and strategic calculations that predate any individual leader.

When women are disproportionately placed in precarious roles, their likelihood of failure increases. Failure, in turn, can reinforce existing biases. A struggling female leader may be taken as evidence of women’s unsuitability for power, rather than as a reflection of the conditions under which she governed. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing. Opportunity is granted, but under terms that make success more difficult to sustain.

If political systems continue to treat female leadership as most useful in moments of crisis, then progress remains partial.

Until then, the rise of women in political leadership will remain open to multiple interpretations. It may signal progress. It may reveal adaptation. Or it may, more uncomfortably, expose the resilience of the very structures it appears to challenge.

The glass cliff is not a single, uniform phenomenon, but one that takes shape through three interrelated factors: the nature of the crisis a woman leader is expected to manage, the political motivations behind her selection, and the resources available to her in responding to that crisis.

These elements, taken together, provide a useful framework for analysing the patterns that emerge across the cases that follow.

Theresa May

Few modern leaders stepped into power on shakier ground than Theresa May. Her premiership stands as one of the clearest contemporary illustrations of the glass cliff in action. When she assumed leadership of the Conservative Party in 2016, it was in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum, a political rupture that had splintered both party unity and national consensus. Her predecessor’s resignation did not simply create a vacancy. It left behind a deeply polarised electorate, an uncertain and unprecedented negotiation process with the European Union (EU), and a governing party fractured along irreconcilable ideological lines.

PHOTO: The People’s Vote March, 23 March 2019, Sian Burkitt on Wikimedia Commons

May’s reputation for competence and caution was presented as an antidote to the volatility that had produced Brexit. Yet, the structural constraints she faced were immense. She was tasked with delivering an outcome that satisfied mutually incompatible factions, while negotiating with external actors from a position of weakened domestic consensus. After  her  resignation,  she  was  classed  as  a  weak leader,  and  her  legacy  was  considered  as  a  huge  failure  in  Brexit  negotiations. However, few analyses focus on how she became a Prime Minister in such a challenging moment for the UK-EU relations, and the inability of her predecessor to reach said outcome.

PHOTO: Theresa May meets German Chancellor Angela Merkel in July 2016, by Prime Minister’s Office on Wikimedia Commons

Her eventual political collapse is often framed as personal failure, but that interpretation obscures more than it reveals. May did not simply falter in office. She inherited a role in which success was already unlikely. Leadership only became available precisely at the moment it was most precarious, when the costs of governing were highest and the margin for error at its thinnest. In this case, the glass cliff was not just a pattern to be observed. It was built into the structure of the role itself.

Angela Merkel

At first glance, the leadership of Angela Merkel seems to unsettle the glass cliff thesis. Her tenure, spanning more than a decade, is often held up as a model of durability and calm in an otherwise turbulent political landscape. A closer look suggests that Merkel’s authority was not established in the absence of a crisis, but repeatedly shaped and consolidated by it.

Her rise within the Christian Democratic Union followed a party scandal that discredited its established leadership and unsettled its internal hierarchy. In that moment of rupture, Merkel’s position as outsider to the party’s entrenched, male-dominated networks became politically advantageous. Angela Merkel’s rise was shaped by two overlapping dynamics that did make her something of an outsider: her East German background and her position within a male-dominated West German political elite. Her gender allowed her to embody renewal, precisely because she was not tied to the structures that had just failed. 

Once in power, Merkel’s chancellorship became synonymous with crisis management. The Eurozone crisis, the European migrant crisis, and broader questions of European integration all required sustained political navigation. Again, similar to May, Merkel’s leadership style, often described as cautious and pragmatic, was well suited to these conditions. Germany’s reputation as the European Union’s anchor during periods of upheaval became closely intertwined with her presence in office – she was one of the only EU leaders to secure a successive term in a period of outgoing governments.

PHOTO: President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump attend the Centennial of the 1918 Armistice Day ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Shealah Craighead on Wikimedia Commons

This does not undermine the structural pattern seen in the experience of Theresa May. The endurance of Angela Merkel was not the product of calm conditions, but of repeated high-stakes navigation through crisis: from holding together the euro during the Eurozone crisis, to managing the political fallout of her decision to admit over a million refugees during the European migrant crisis, to coordinating sanctions and diplomacy after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. Merkel’s 16 years of perseverance reveals what it takes to stay in leadership without falling, even when the ground beneath never fully steadies.

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir

The appointment of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir in Iceland pushes the logic of the glass cliff into more radical territory, where the crisis is not merely political but systemic. When she took office in 2009, Iceland was not dealing with routine instability or party fragmentation. It was confronting the near-total collapse of its financial system following the Icelandic financial crisis. Major banks had failed, the currency had sharply depreciated, and public anger had spilled into the streets, forcing the government from power. This was not a difficult inheritance. It was a political vacuum.

What distinguishes Sigurðardóttir from figures like Theresa May or even Angela Merkel is the scale and nature of that rupture. In those cases, women stepped into systems under strain, required to manage contradictions without fundamentally remaking them. In Iceland, the system’s legitimacy was under scrutiny. Authority and faith in government had to be rebuilt. This altered the function of leadership. The task was not to reconcile factions or stabilise a divided party, but to restore a baseline level of trust in governance itself.

PHOTO: Iceland’s Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir at the Nordic-Baltic Prime Ministers’ Meeting at the Nordic Council Session in Stockholm 2009, Magnus Fröderberg on Wikimedia Commons

Iceland’s response to collapse, including its handling of debt, its engagement with international creditors, and its willingness to depart from prevailing economic orthodoxies attracted global attention. Her identity as both Iceland’s first female prime minister and the world’s first openly gay head of government reinforced this sense of departure, but it did so in a context where symbolic change carried material weight. In contrast to larger states bound tightly into existing financial architectures, Iceland’s marginal position in the international system afforded it a degree of flexibility. Sigurðardóttir’s government could pursue recovery strategies that were politically viable at home – Iceland did not socialise private bank losses fully onto taxpayers, instead allowing creditors to bear losses – even if they diverged from external expectations.

Not all glass cliffs are equally restrictive. In larger, more entrenched systems, crisis can narrow the scope of action, as seen in the constrained agility of leaders like May. In smaller or more disrupted systems, the same crisis can expand it. Sigurðardóttir governed at a moment when the usual rules had been suspended, allowing for a redefinition of both domestic policy and international posture.

Sigurðardóttir does not sit neatly alongside earlier examples. Her case suggests that while women may be more likely to access power in moments of instability, the consequences of that access depend heavily on the structure of the crisis itself. Where institutions remain intact but contested, leadership is constrained. Where they collapse outright, leadership can become constitutive, shaping the terms on which recovery and re-engagement with the international system take place.

Julia Gillard

The experience of Julia Gillard offers a particularly sharp illustration of how precarious leadership can take shape within a domestic setting, while still carrying broader international implications. Gillard, Australia’s first woman prime minister, did not arrive in office through a clear electoral mandate, but through an internal party rupture that left the government politically exposed from the outset. Leading a minority government, she was required to negotiate constantly with crossbenchers to maintain confidence, turning day-to-day governance into a delicate exercise in survival rather than stability.

PHOTO: Kevin Rudd (right) and Julia Gillard (left) at their first press conference as leader and deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party on 4 December 2006, Adam Carr on Wikimedia Commons

That fragility was not confined to parliamentary arithmetic. It spilled into policy, most visibly in the government’s approach to asylum seekers. The reintroduction of offshore processing, including facilities on Nauru and Manus Island, placed Australia at the centre of an increasingly contentious international debate on border control and human rights. These measures reflected the pressures of governing in a hostile political environment, where perception of weakness on borders carried – and continues to carry – significant electoral risk. Domestic instability, in this sense, shaped Australia’s external posture, demonstrating how fragile leadership conditions can harden state behaviour in the international arena.

PHOTO: Julia Gillard at APEC Japan 2010, a series of political meetings held across Japan among the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, Gobierno de Chile on Wikimedia Commons

At the same time, Gillard’s tenure was marked by an intensity of gendered scrutiny that exceeded routine political contestation. The language directed at her often moved beyond critique into something more visceral, culminating in her now famous misogyny speech, which laid bare the double standards she faced. The tone of public discourse to ‘Ditch the Witch’, did not simply reflect personal animosity. It exposed the deeper cultural constraints that continue to structure women’s access to and exercise of power.

Her eventual removal by her own party underscores the conditional nature of her leadership. Like other women who ascended in moments of political rupture, Gillard occupied a role defined as much by its instability as by its historic significance. 

PHOTO: President Barack Obama holds a joint press conference with Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, by White House on Wikimedia Commons

The solution is not to stop appointing women to positions of power in moments of crisis, but to ensure that political roles are attractive for female candidates, and such appointments are not the primary route through which women access power at all. A 2026 report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, found that women in parliament face higher levels of public intimidation than their male counterparts, both online and offline. Notably, 76% of women surveyed reported experiencing some form of violence, compared with 68% of men. This reinforces the experiences of May, Merkel, Sigurðardóttir, and Gillard, highlighting that women in leadership are not only more likely to be elevated during periods of instability, but are also systematically subjected to heightened scrutiny and hostility once in power.

Alternately, quota systems, when implemented with genuine structural support rather than tokenism, have demonstrated measurable and sustained results. Rwanda, for instance, has maintained some of the world’s highest rates of female parliamentary representation for over two decades. Encouragingly, similar progress is evident in the Australian context: the Australian Government’s Working for Women strategy has not only met but exceeded its gender balance targets, with women holding 54.3% of government board positions in 2024–25 and a majority of portfolios achieving parity at both member and leadership levels. While these gains do not eliminate the structural conditions that produce glass cliffs, they point to the effectiveness of deliberate, pipeline-focused interventions in systemically normalising women’s leadership beyond moments of crisis.

Beyond representation, foundational ‘glass cliff’ scholars Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam, argue that institutional reform must target the conditions that make crisis appointments of women possible in the first place: cultures of risk-transfer, unconscious bias in succession planning, and the persistent assumption that women are best suited to lead when there is the least to gain. The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership champions that empowering women in politics means reforming the systems that make their leadership ordinary, not exceptional, stable rather than precarious, and chosen for their promise rather than deployed as a last resort.

Understanding the glass cliff means moving beyond isolated praise or criticism of crisis leaders and recognising the pattern beneath it. Women’s rise to leadership is not coincidental, but structured – shaped by crises, constrained by systems, and deeply embedded in the political logic that continues to define the international order.