Change Agents with a Past: Female Executives’ Early-Career Contexts and Gender Equality at Workplaces

This paper studies the role of early career experiences in female organizational leaders’ impact on workplace gender equality. Connecting literature on change agency with career imprinting, we present novel theorizing on how representation and power of women in leadership experienced early in managerial careers shape female leaders’ impact on differences in outcomes between men and women. We used longitudinal register panel data on employee wages and linked it to the executive careers of the directors of Dutch organizations between 2006 and 2019. Fixed-effects panel regression analyses demonstrate that female organizational leaders exposed to female peers in directorate boards and a female CEO during their first managerial role are likelier to become “agents of change” by furthering female employees’ wage progression and chances of receiving a permanent contract. Our study enriches the agents of change literature by drawing attention to the influence of early career experiences on female leaders’ impact on gender equality in workplaces.