Follow Him or Her? CEO Gender and Inter-organizational Imitation of Strategic Behaviors

Firms routinely benchmark their strategic decisions against industry peers, yet some firms become more influential referents than others. We examine whether the gender of a referent firm's CEO shapes the extent to which its strategic behaviors are emulated. Drawing on research on gender and social evaluation, we argue that CEO gender serves as a diffuse expertise cue, leading observing firms to place greater weight on the strategic behaviors of male-led than female-led peers. We further propose that this tendency depends on observer CEOs' motivations for self-enhancement and status-quo maintenance, reflected in their gender and political ideology, respectively. Using a panel of S&P 1500 firms from 1997 to 2022, we find that the strategic behaviors of female-led firms are systematically discounted in the benchmarking process. This discounting is weaker among female CEOs and, for international diversification, among more politically liberal CEOs. The results are robust across multiple analytical strategies, including propensity score matching, randomization inference placebo tests, instrumental variable estimation, and additional robustness analyses. Our study contributes to research on interorganizational imitation and gender in the upper echelons by identifying systematic gender-based asymmetries in strategic benchmarking.