Michelle K. Ryan

Ryan has been appointed director of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, with effect from 1 July 2021.

Together with Alex Haslam, she coined the term "glass cliff" to describe how the experiences of women who have broken through the glass ceiling differ from those of their male counterparts. Their idea was named by the New York Times as one of the ideas that shaped 2008. The term was shortlisted as Word of the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016.

She completed her undergraduate and a Ph.D. study in psychology from Australian National University in 2004 for her thesis ‘A gendered self or a gendered context? A self-categorization appraisal of gender differences’.

In 2004 she was awarded a Research Councils UK academic fellowship. She was Associate Editor for the British Journal of Social Psychology between 2010 and 2012. In 2014 she undertook a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to examine the role of identity in explaining perceptions of work-life balance. At the University of Exeter she has held the roles of Faculty Associate Dean (Research), Dean of Post-graduate Research and inaugural Director of the Exeter Doctoral College.

Michelle K. Ryan (born 1973) is a Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Exeter and (part-time) Professor of Diversity at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.