When things aren't going well... let the women come
BarcelonaPedro Sánchez promised to shake up the party to try to overcome the Santos Cerdán case and he has done so. choosing a Valencian, Rebeca Torró, to replace the current PSOE organization secretary, and also a Catalan—Montse Mínguez—as the new visible face of the Spanish Socialists. But they are not the only ones chosen at this time, the worst for the PSOE since it regained power in Moncloa in 2018: it has also chosen Anabel Mateos as number two in the organization area and Enma López as deputy spokesperson, in addition to staging a change of course this Friday afternoon by taking a photo with the Ábalos notes, which will be incompatible with being a PSOE member.
We now know that this chapter in Pedro Sánchez's resilience manual—of which we may already be witnessing the end—is no different from that of many organizations when they find themselves in times of crisis. When things go wrong, parties, companies, or institutions tend to rely more on women. In other words, they cede power to women when it is most difficult to turn things around and easiest to fail. This is not the case when the probability of success is higher, as then the tendency is for men to be placed.
The glass cliff
This is not a generalization, but rather a concept theorized as a "glass cliff." It was coined by Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam in the 2000s at the University of Exeter, in a study published in the British Journal of Management, after analyzing large companies and who ran them. According to them, and despite the subsequent academic discussion, the companies that had appointed women to management positions were coming off a period of poor results; while if things were going well, the tendency was to place men at the top. All of this, translated into politics, means turning to women only when things are going badly and leaving them little room for power when the trend is on the up. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who hopes to soon reach the Moncloa, appointed his closest confidant, Miguel Tellado, as his number two, with whom he already worked in tandem in Galicia. But not only that: he has given her more power than Cuca Gamarra, the outgoing secretary general during Pablo Casado's time.
Sánchez, then, has decided to play the card of feminizing the party's decision-making core because he probably believes it is the way to present an organization that is the antithesis of what José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán represent. The Spanish president has not only suffered these days from the corruption that allegedly affects his entourage, but also from the Audio recordings about the prostitutes of Ábalos and the degrading treatment of women that was evident in his conversations with Koldo García. A real torpedo to the waterline of his feminist discourse – now also abolitionist of prostitution – and above all his female electorate, with much more weight than the male one and which was key to reaching Moncloa. We'll see if this is just a facelift or a profound renewal of our ways of doing things.