After months of planning, the Most Powerful Women Summit has come to a close. It was an extraordinary event—a gathering of some of the most accomplished women in the world, weighing in on the globe’s most pressing issues and getting real about their own lives and careers.
As the three days of the Summit continued on, one theme became clear to me: we kept hearing about glass cliffs and glass ceilings.
It started on Day 1, when Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, described the impact of being the second—not the first—woman to lead the global organization. “Christine came and broke the glass ceiling,” she said of her predecessor, Christine Lagarde (now president of the European Central Bank). “I came after her. No scratch.” Georgieva even brushed off her shoulders for emphasis.
The next night, we heard from Vice President Kamala Harris sitting onstage at the National Cathedral. Harris didn’t have the luxury of being the second—she has often been the first in everything she’s done. And she was honest about the cost that can come with. “Do you think that breaking barriers means you start out on one side of the barrier and just end up on the other side of the barrier? No, there’s breaking involved,” she emphasized. “And when you break things, it might get cut and you might bleed.”
Lest you think Harris was questioning her choice to break so many barriers, she added: “And it is worth it every single time.”
Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell asked Harris if her 107-day run for president was the ultimate glass cliff, or impossible job given to a woman. (As Harris pointed out, it was unprecedented in more ways than that: she took over the race from a sitting president, running against a former president, who had been running continuously for 10 years.) Harris didn’t like the term glass cliff—because she said it implied “finality,” and she’s “not into that.”
Finally, I had the pleasure of moderating what was one of my favorite conversations we’ve ever convened at the MPW Summit. It featured three former CEOs. Karen Lynch led CVS Health (and joined us as a guest co-chair for the Summit); she was No. 1 on the MPW list for years, and her position made CVS Health the largest company ever led by a female CEO. Roz Brewer led Walgreens Boots Alliance; also a MPW list mainstay, she’d been a top exec as CEO of Sam’s Club within Walmart and at Starbucks. And Sima Sistani was the CEO of WeightWatchers, which she joined to reinvigorate for the digital era—before the rise of GLP-1s. All three have left their roles, under varying circumstances, over the past year.
The conversation was off the record, so I can’t tell you too much more about it. But it was titled “Life after the big job,” a place to dive into going from CEO to “former,” from a career, business, and personal perspective. Whether or not they were glass cliffs, all three of these jobs were certainly transformation jobs. Women at the Summit were eager for the candid conversation about the choice to take up a position of that nature and the personal and professional impact.
So what does it means that glass cliffs and ceilings are in the air right now? Women are thinking about what it means to make it to the top. Trump’s win (and Harris’s loss), the rise of bro culture again in the business world, Trump’s assault on DEI—all these trends are making us reflect on what it takes, and whether we’ll ever get there.
In this room of women it’s easy to believe that—despite the serious setbacks—we will.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
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PARTING WORDS
"I’m hoping that this show will continue to normalize seeing a female president, and maybe art will show the way for life to imitate art and see a woman in this role."
— Allison Janney on her character in Netflix's The Diplomat
