Kim Campbell Syndrome

In my last post, about Labels, I used the phrase “I didn’t know there was a word for it”. As it happens I’ve been trying to put together a post on how women tend to get put in charge of sinking ships. The idea being that the company, party, or government gets to look like they're making an effort at being representative, but the ship keeps sinking and the woman gets ousted shortly after so they don’t need to have her in charge for long, and they get a convenient scapegoat.

I was mostly thinking of this in terms of Canadian politics, because that’s what came to mind first. Alison Redford. Pauline Marois. Probably Kathleen Wynne and Christy Clark, though they’ve both survived their first elections as leaders.

In my head I’d started calling this Kim Campbell syndrome. But as it turns out, this phenomenon is well known enough to have a name. It’s called the Glass Cliff, and knowing the name makes it much easier to find the many examples that I hadn’t heard of before.

There is a problem with the phenomenon being well established, though… there’s not much else I can say about it because that ground has already been well trod. Just go read the wikipedia article, I guess.