spent five years trying to execute. Erica is walking into a burning building. And she is, unambiguously, the most qualified person to walk into that building. That is precisely the problem. The pattern hiding behind the headline There is a phenomenon in organisational psychology called the glass cliff. First identified by British researchers Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam in 2005, it describes what happens when women are disproportionately appointed to senior leadership roles during periods of organisational crisis or instability. Not instead of qualified men, but instead of being appointed when things are going well. The research is consistent. The pattern is not subtle. And in Australian retail right now, it is impossible to ignore. Consider the evidence from the past two years alone. In February 2024, Woolworths named Amanda Bardwell as its first female Group CEO in 100 years. She stepped into the role as six separate government and regulatory inquiries were investigating the supermarket duopoly for alleged price gouging, anti-competitive behaviour, and supplier manipulation. Her predecessor departed days after a widely reported incident during a “Four Corners” interview examining those very accusations. Bardwell, a proven, 23-year veteran of the business, inherited that mess. The same year, Myer appointed Olivia Wirth as Executive Chair and CEO, who took on both roles simultaneously, an unusual governance structure that corporate experts described as a significant risk. She arrived at a company that had just reported a 20 per cent decline in net profit and falling total sales. Wirth was not Myer’s first-choice candidate, reports stated at the time, yet she took on twice the responsibility of her predecessors for a salary lower than what the role typically commands. At Coles, Leah Weckert became the first female CEO in the supermarket’s 100-year history in May 2023, inheriting a business embroiled in the same cost-of-living backlash and pricing scrutiny that would later consume Woolworths. And now Berchtold at David Jones. First woman. One hundred eighty-eight years. Consecutive losses. New debt facility. Same day. The data is no longer deniable I want to be careful here, because there is an argument made often in these moments that I think does real harm. It goes something like, But look how capable these women are. Maybe a crisis is an opportunity. That framing lets the system off the hook entirely. The women appointed to these roles are not benefiting from a generous opportunity. They are being asked to do something extraordinarily difficult, often with less runway, less political capital, and less institutional goodwill than their predecessors were afforded. Research shows that when companies are already in crisis, boards and investors have less patience. The tolerance for failure is lower. And if the turnaround doesn’t come fast enough, the woman who inherited the wreckage is often blamed for it. The crisis does not make the appointment more impressive. It makes the standard applied to the person in the role more punishing. The cost of calling this progress So what do we do about this? The honest answer is that there is no single intervention. But there are three things the industry can start doing differently, starting now. Appoint women when things are going well. The test of whether a board genuinely believes in a woman as a leader is not whether they give her a crisis to manage. It is whether they give her the growth phase, the expansion, the upside. If women appear on succession lists only when the situation has become difficult enough that the board is finally willing to take the “risk”, that is not inclusion. It is an outsourcing of risk to women. Give women what their predecessors received Time. Resources. The benefit of the doubt. When I wrote about Erica’s appointment, I said this directly: Give her what you would have given the six men before her. That is not a low bar. The men before her were given considerable runway through considerable difficulty. She deserves the same. Stop treating ‘first woman’ as the whole story Every headline about these appointments leads with the historic nature of the milestone. That framing is not wrong, it is historic. But it also obscures the context. The story is not just that a woman finally got the job. The story is when she got it, and what that says about when Australian retail is finally willing to let women lead. Backing the leader, questioning the system I am backing Berchtold. Loudly, and without reservation. She has earned this role across two decades and some of Australia’s most complex retail organisations. I have no doubt she will do something extraordinary with it. But my hope for the next generation of female retail leaders is that they are not handed the burning building and told it is an honour to hold the hose. The glass cliff is not a compliment. It is a pattern. And patterns, unlike crises, can be changed before they become a crisis at all.