是的，他很随意。是的，他似乎没有意识到自己观点与雇主之间的不协调。是的，他已经得到了应有的报应。但这些并不是我仍在思考麦肯锡公司高级合伙人克里斯·布拉德利的原因——他上周在与一本关于美国企业界女性所面临挑战的新书作者进行激烈辩论后，仍让我难以忘怀。
Yes, he was cavalier. Yes, he seemed unaware of the dissonance between his views and that of his employer. And yes, he has gotten his comeuppance. But those aren't the reasons I'm still thinking about the McKinsey & Co. senior partner who got into a heated debate last week with the author of a new book about the challenges faced by women in corporate America.
如果你错过了，克里斯·布拉德利在公开质疑“玻璃悬崖”存在后被麦肯锡研究部门剥夺了领导职务。这一术语由学者提出，用来描述公司常常只在危机或转型期间才让女性担任首席执行官的情况。
In case you missed it, Chris Bradley was stripped of his leadership role at McKinsey’s research arm after he publicly doubted the existence of the glass cliff, a term coined by academics to capture how companies often give women a shot at being chief executive officer only in the middle of a crisis or turnaround.
女性往往会被提供玻璃悬崖职位，因为她们是男性不愿触碰的岗位。当女性在这些不可能完成的任务中不可避免地挣扎时，她们的失败会被转化为针对她们的证据，并强化了关于女性领导力的刻板印象——正是这些刻板印象最初让她们更难攀登到顶峰。
Women tend to get offered glass cliff roles because they’re the ones men don’t want to touch. When women invariably struggle in these impossible jobs, their failure gets turned into evidence against them and reinforces the stereotypes about female leadership that made it harder for them to claw their way to the top in the first place.
你可能已经看出事情的发展方向。在布拉德利如今已删除的领英帖子中，他曾称“玻璃悬崖”是“一种非常方便的方式，让人总是像在雨中一样成为受害者”。在另一条帖子中，他写道：“我们曾经有女性晋升为首席执行官的问题，但现在我们有了一个新问题——她们得到的工作太难了？这到底是不是真的？”我并不反对就玻璃悬崖进行严肃的辩论。
You can probably see where this is all going. In one of his now-deleted posts on LinkedIn, Bradley called the glass cliff “a very convenient way to always be a victim in the rain.”In another he wrote, “We once had a problem of female advancement to CEO, but now we have a new problem that the jobs they get are too hard? Is this actually a thing?”I have no problem with a rigorous debate about the glass cliff.
但除了他的语气之外，最令人担忧的是他声称这一现象甚至不值得研究。“我不打算开始研究玻璃悬崖，因为我认为这甚至不在世界前1000大问题之列，”布拉德利在帖子中写道。
But what was most troubling, aside from his tone, was his claim that the phenomenon isn’t even worth studying. “I am not going to start researching glass cliffs as I don’t think it ranks in the top 1000 problems of the world,” Bradley posted.
如果这需要说明的话，影响世界一半人口的问题不是小众问题。布拉德利的立场对于一位负责帮助领导研究机构的高管来说是奇怪且有问题的 — — 尤其是一个已经研究职场女性超过十年的机构。（“此次交流与我们的观点以及我们所期望的标准不符，”麦肯锡发言人在一份声明中对《彭博社》表示。仍在该公司担任高级合伙人的布拉德利未作评论。）
In case this needs to be said, an issue that impacts half of the world’s population is not niche. Bradley’s position is a strange and problematic one for an executive whose job it was to help lead a research institution — especially one that has closely studied women in the workplace for more than a decade. (“This exchange was inconsistent with our views and the standards we expect,” a McKinsey spokesperson told Bloomberg News in a statement. Bradley, who remains a senior partner at the firm,has not commented.)
女性习惯于看到自己的亲身经历被当作不严肃的事情。只需问任何在医疗系统中挣扎求生的女性。仅影响或主要影响女性的医疗状况 — — 比如自身免疫性疾病或子宫内膜异位症 — — 严重缺乏研究。女性因药物出现不良副作用的频率是男性的两倍，很大程度上是因为剂量历史上一直基于在男性身上进行的临床试验。由于女性心脏病发作的症状与男性患者不同，她们常常被忽视。
Women are used to having their lived experiences dismissed as unserious. Just ask any woman who has struggled to navigate the healthcare system. Medical conditions that exclusively or primarily affect women — autoimmune diseases or endometriosis, for example — are grossly understudied. Women face adverse side effects from drugs twice as often as men, in large part because dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men. Because heart attack symptoms in women present differently than in male patients, they often get overlooked.
在所有这些情况下，问题的存在并不会因为人们选择忽视或对其研究不足而变得不真实；实际上，这些问题只是没有被及时发现罢了。斯坦福大学 VMware 女性领导力创新实验室的社会学家玛丽安·库珀（Marianne Cooper）曾告诉我：“如果你想忽视或掩盖某个社会问题，只需停止收集相关数据即可。”（库珀同时也是《Lean In》和麦肯锡报告的撰稿人之一。）
In all these cases, the problem isn’t any less real just because it goes unacknowledged or understudied. Instead, it just goes undetected. “If you want to ignore or hide a social problem, you just stop collecting the data,” Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab, once told me. (Cooper also happens to be an author on the Lean In & McKinsey reports.)
当然，关于“玻璃悬崖”现象对女性领导者的影响，其严重程度可能比那些倡导者所声称的更为复杂或微不足道；但这恰恰是我们应该更深入研究的理由，而不是减少研究的动力。事实依然是：女性首席执行官的任期普遍比男性首席执行官短。根据 Exechange 的数据，在过去十年中，Russell 3000 指数成分公司的女性首席执行官平均任期仅为 6.2 年，而男性首席执行官的任期则为 8.9 年。
Sure, it could be possible that the impact of the glass cliff on female leaders may be more complicated or less important than its advocates argue. But that’s a reason to study it more deeply, not less. The fact remains that female CEOs have shorter tenures than their male counterparts. As I reported earlier this year, female CEOs of Russell 3000 companies departed after an average tenure of 6.2 years versus 8.9 years for their male counterparts over the last decade, according to Exechange, which tracks executive changes.
在分析这些离职原因时，该研究机构发现女性首席执行官更有可能被迫离职。如果“玻璃悬崖”现象并非导致这一现象的根本原因，那么我们难道不想弄清楚真正的原因吗？
In examining the reasons for the departures, the research firm found that women were more likely than men to be forced out of their CEO jobs. If the glass cliff isn’t the reason behind these numbers, don’t we want to know what is?
所有这些问题的最大风险在于：我们可能会因此忽略更严峻的整体现实。我们可以对“玻璃悬崖”现象争论不休，但女性在《财富》500 强企业中的占比多年来一直停滞在 11% 不变。按照这样的趋势，女性要达到与男性同等的领导地位，恐怕需要整整一个世纪的时间。无论背后的原因是什么，这种现象都值得我们深入探讨和理解。
The one risk in all of this is that we miss the grim bigger picture. We can quibble all we want about the glass cliff, but the number of women leading Fortune 500 companies is stubbornly flat year over year at 11%. At this rate, it will take about a century for women to reach parity with men in the corner office. No matter the underlying cause, that’s a phenomenon worth understanding.