Why Female Leaders Are Set Up to Fail

From New Zealand to Germany, the responses to the past year’s events have proven how effective female leadership can be. “Women often are more even-handed leaders, and what we’ve seen in this pandemic is that the countries that have women at the helm ...have really taken lead in addressing this pandemic head-on,” said Pardis Mahdavi, author and dean of social sciences at Arizona State University, during a Zócalo/ASU Center on the Future of War event, “Can Women’s Movements Save the World?" However, while research has found female leaders are able to work better under pressure, concepts such as the “glass cliff” make women vulnerable to unfair expectations in the workplace. For instance, studies show that women are often put in the CEO position of companies when they are failing, Mahdavi said. In turn, she explained, when women do manage to turn a struggling workplace around, their success is accredited to luck, not skill.