Gender Diversity in Senior Leadership Boosts Corporate Citizenship

Woman leads a meeting — Source: Shutterstock

Published on: April 23, 2025 at 5:31 pm

Organizations don’t always appreciate the value that gender diversity in leadership roles can bring. Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia said that organizations have been reluctant to increase gender diversity in their senior leadership.

“We’ve put a lot of regulatory pressure on organizations to increase gender representation in senior levels.” Kulik said. “Some organizations respond to that pressure by doing the minimum; they’ll make a couple of appointments and then they are ‘one and done’ or ‘two and through.’

“However, having women in the leadership team can deliver major benefits to organizations,” she said. “We know that organizations that have more gender diversity in senior leadership are better corporate citizens.

“They’re less likely to engage in unethical behavior; they engage in more philanthropy and corporate social responsibility; they have smaller gender pay gaps; they offer more employee participation; they actually become better organizations.”

The effects of diversity in senior leadership aren’t as straightforward as many assume.

“It’s not because the women are so good on their own; it’s because anytime you have a decision-making group that has visible demographic diversity, they’re sitting around the boardroom and see there’s some men and there’s some women, the group acts differently,” Kulik said.

“The group automatically assumes that there are some hidden differences that they need to explore; they ask more questions, and they consider more solutions; they look at more data,” she said. “So they make more thoughtful and better decisions—it’s a really powerful effect.”

Kulik said that if leaders make organizations more inclusive and better for women and people with cultural and racial variations, then they’re actually creating better organizations.

“We see the same sorts of beneficial effects of diversity in any kind of decision-making group,” Kulik said. “And because of trickle-down effects, increasing diversity at a senior level increases diversity at lower levels too.

“So choose any level to start with and increase diversity at that level,” she said. “You’ll soon see more diversity at other levels and you’ll create a more inclusive organization.”

A sample of Kulik’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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