Imagine that you are part of the Executive Board of a Fortune 500 company that is facing significant fiscal challenges. The potential of going out of business is high, and the most recent Chief Executive Officer has conveniently gone into retirement. You must now select a new CEO, and your top candidates are a man and a woman of almost equal qualifications, ages and experience. What is your intuitive choice: male or female?

This question essentially frames the dilemma known as the glass cliff phenomenon. It is a slight variation of the glass ceiling, and refers to the increased likelihood of women being appointed to positions of power that are associated with increased risk and failure. The term was coined 10 years ago by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and Alexander Haslam, and since then, it has been met with a lot of skepticism. Many have written it off as being more feminist frenzy, but the evidence in both academic studies and real life situations suggest otherwise.

As you can now see, selecting a woman in answer to the above question would reaffirm the idea of the glass cliff.

The glass cliff phenomenon is viewed negatively because it reeks of a sense of gender discrimination, even if the nature of this discrimination is not entirely explicit — the example of Mary Barra, the current CEO of General Motors Company, provides a great example. Barra, earned the position at a time when GM was dealing with a scandal because of faulty parts that it had distributed. The media cast doubt on the legitimacy of her position, suggesting that she was a disaster-management strategy rather than a leader. After all, people are less likely to harshly criticize a woman and the company she now runs, especially if that woman happens to be a mother like Barra.

The gender archetype of women being motherly, empathetic, gentle and warm limits the situations in which they can attain senior positions. They are almost treated like napkins: used to clean up the mess and then thrown away. This conditional value, placed on a stereotype of women’s abilities, is problematic because it reinforces the assumptions that men are born to lead — an assumption that we have spent years trying to overturn. It is not enough that there are women in leadership positions: it is also important to understand how they got them and whether they are going to maintain them.

Another perspective, often taken by those who deny the negative connotations of the glass cliff, is that women are elected to be the top dog in dire situations because they have the skills and abilities to do so. To put this opinion more colloquially, a woman is chosen because she is seen as a secret weapon. This stance has been taken in the case of the new British Prime Minister, Theresa May. After the announcement that she would be replacing former Prime Minister David Cameron, social media was flooded with her lengthy CV and her merits. Her dependability, Oxford education and track record of being a tough, composed leader in the Home Office were highlighted as evidence of her suitability to become prime minister. While this is true, it is also true that it has taken a possibly disastrous referendum for Theresa May to attain such a position.

The circumstances surrounding Theresa May’s inauguration strongly support the theory of the glass cliff. It also suggests another reason why the glass cliff might exist: to use women as the ideal scapegoats. Women who take up executive positions during or right before failure must inevitably take the blame and hence justifiably be forced out of their positions on the basis of such criticism. A new leader, most likely a man, can now start rebuilding the company or country that was inevitably going to crumble with or without the female leader. As a result, the new leader gets an opportunity to shine while the woman, in this case Theresa May, gets labeled as unfit to lead. The degree to which the glass cliff can be applied to Theresa May’s circumstance will be revealed by whether she will hold on to her title as she faces upcoming challenges. Only then can we know whether Theresa May has been set up to fail, or chosen for greatness.

It is easy to find counterexamples to the glass cliff theory in order to negate its existence. There have been women who have become leaders under relatively calm circumstances, such as the UAE Minister of State for Youth Shamma Al Mazrui. For her, there is no obvious potential for failure. However, this does not mean that the glass cliff is nonexistent. Scores of studies have demonstrated that this trend exists and cannot be rejected as an uninformed complaint. The exceptions to the glass cliff simply mean that, like always, there are some women who are overcoming the obstacles created to trip them over.