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

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This paper examines the role of first managerial experiences in shaping women top executives’ impact on workplace gender equality. Connecting literature on change agency with career imprinting, we present novel theorizing on how the representation and power of women in leadership experienced in the first managerial role shape women leaders’ impact on differences in outcomes between men and women. We used longitudinal register panel data on employee wages and linked them to the executive careers of the directors of Dutch organizations between 2006 and 2019. Fixed-effects panel regression analyses demonstrated that women executives exposed to same-gender peers in directorate boards and a woman CEO during their first executive role are more likely to become agents of change by furthering women 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 women leaders’ impact on gender equality in workplaces.