GENDER AND SPECIES DIFFERENCESthat are in a crisis. Recent examples include Lynn Elsenhans’s appoint-
ment as CEO of the oil company Sunoco in 2008, after their shares had
plummeted in value; and Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir’s election as prime
minister of Iceland, soon after her country’s economy had been devas-
tated by the global financial crisis. These real-life examples are backed
up by laboratory studies in which participants have been shown to favour
female candidates when choosing a leader for fictional organizations
described as being in a crisis. The glass cliff is bad news for women
because, in general, leaders of organizations that are struggling are less
likely to enjoy career success in the future.
A 2010 study by Susanne Bruckmüller and Nyla Branscombe at the
Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Kansas, suggested that the
glass cliff is related to gender stereotypes and stereotypical beliefs
about what kind of leader is needed in a crisis. Using fictional company
scenarios and fictional leadership candidates, the pair showed that in a
crisis situation, male candidates were less likely to be perceived as having
female attributes, such as strong communication skills and empathy,
and were consequently judged as less well-equipped to lead. Almost by
default, therefore, female candidates ended up being preferred in a crisis.
The researchers highlighted the double irony of their finding, writing:
“When women get to enjoy the spoils of leadership, (a) it is not because
they are seen to deserve them, but because men no longer do, and (b) this
only occurs when, and because, there are fewer spoils to enjoy.”
A man walked into a bar...
Men and women have their differences, but apparently their sense
of humour isn’t one of them. Both sexes laugh as much as each other
and they laugh at the same things. In a 1999 paper, Rod Martin and
Nicholas Kuiper asked eighty men and women to keep a diary record
of their laughter for three days. There was huge individual variation- one person reported laughing 89 times in one day! – but men and
women didn’t differ in how much they laughed. More recently, Eiman
Azim at Stanford University scanned the brains of ten men and ten
women as they rated the funniness of seventy cartoons. Intriguingly,
although there were no sex differences in the type of cartoons deemed
to be funny, or in the amount of amusement they caused, there were
differences in underlying brain activity. Women seemed to take longer
to decide whether a joke was funny, and they showed greater activity
in reward-related brain areas, suggesting that, compared with men,
they were more surprised when a cartoon made them chuckle.