Women at the Helm: Female Top Managers and Business Process Innovation in Ecuadorian Firms

Women’s participation in senior management has increased, yet evidence regarding its relationship with different forms of business innovation remains inconclusive, particularly in emerging economies. This study examines whether formal Ecuadorian firms with a woman as their top manager are more likely to report business process innovation than firms led by men. A quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional design was applied to firm-level data from 345 enterprises included in the World Bank Enterprise Survey Ecuador; 66 firms (19.1%) reported a female top manager. Process innovation was measured from WBES item H5, which asks whether the establishment introduced a new or improved process during the preceding three years, including production or service methods, logistics/delivery/distribution, or supporting activities. Weighted logit models with firm controls and sector and region fixed effects were estimated. In the main specification (n = 327), female top management was associated with higher odds of process innovation (OR = 3.475; 95% CI [1.570, 7.688]; p = 0.002), and the direction remained positive across robustness checks. No statistically significant association was found with product innovation, R&D expenditure, or green-practice adoption. The findings therefore support a differentiated interpretation: female top management is associated with internal process change, but not uniformly with every innovation outcome. Because the data are cross-sectional and the female-manager group is comparatively small, the estimates are associational, their precision and heterogeneity are limited, and generalization is restricted to the formal non-agricultural private-sector population represented by the WBES sampling frame.