Collaboration, Venus, and Mars: The Gender Factor in Intersectoral Relations

Scholarship across disciplines offers evidence that gender plays a significant role in organizational dynamics. Gender differences in preferences, attitudes, and behaviors affect employee behavior and organizational outcomes. This article extends the gender factor into the realm of interorganizational and intersectoral collaboration to examine not just whether, but also how gender affects the management of these relationships. We analyze these differences in the context of local government–nonprofit organization (NPO) relations in a developing country with data from two 2017 nationally representative surveys of local governments and NPOs in Lebanon. Our results suggest that in male-dominated nations like Lebanon, females leading local government organizations are less likely to enter into cross-sector collaborations than their male counterparts, and in the nonprofit sector, gender plays no significant role in the decision to collaborate. However, among existing collaborations, females, as compared with males, have been more likely to both initiate and fund the interorganizational/intersectoral relationships. These results contribute to the literature on gender, management, and intersectoral collaboration, and offer an agenda for future scholarship on these topics.