Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino Is Teetering on the Glass Cliff

In December, Elon Musk, then only two months into his tenure as owner and CEO of Twitter, put out a poll asking whether he should resign as CEO of the company. When a 57.5 percent majority encouraged him to resign, Musk tweeted, “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software and servers teams.”

Ten days ago, Musk announced that he had indeed found someone foolish enough to helm the floundering social media company: Linda Yaccarino. Taking a CEO seat was a step up for Yaccarino, who previously led global advertising at NBCUniversal, and it enlarged the tiny pool of women leading tech companies.

But although Yaccarino is widely regarded in the ad industry as highly competent, people who study workplace gender dynamics  see her as the latest victim of a pernicious pattern known as the glass cliff, in which women are more likely to be promoted into top jobs at organizations in crisis. That makes women leaders appear less likely to succeed, because they are drafted when times are toughest. 

“In some ways I have yet to see a better definition of the glass cliff than the challenge Elon has set out here,” says Christy Glass, a sociologist at Utah State University who has studied the phenomenon. “This just seems to be the perfect storm of a situation at Twitter.” Past examples of the glass cliff in tech include the appointment of Google executive Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO in 2012, when the company was rapidly losing ground to Google and Facebook. She eventually negotiated a $4.5 billion sale to Verizon and stepped down. Investor Ellen Pao was appointed CEO of Reddit in 2014 to clean up the platform but resigned in 2015 after backlash from users.

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