Counting Women, Keeping Men in Power? Willingness–Ability–Authority in Family Firms

Abstract

This commentary unsettles the “add-women-and-stir” perspective and re-centers gendered power in family firms as a question of governance, not headcounts. We see family firms as gendered regimes where kinship, ownership, and succession intertwine with broader societal gender norms to maintain patriarchal settlements. Building on feminist analyses of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity, we advance a willingness–ability–authority framework to illuminate how managers and family members navigate gender equality in these organizations. We argue that willingness tends to be shaped by masculinity-contest norms that frame equality work as status-threatening, whereas ability can be constrained by kin coalitions, heir-first legitimacy, and informal governance structures. We argue that discourses of ESG and “family values” risk remaining symbolic unless reforms meaningfully redistribute decision rights over pay, promotion, and succession. In this commentary, we set an agenda for future research around (i) the “ideal-heir” scripts, (ii) feminized glue work that sustains legitimacy without jurisdiction, (iii) temporal dynamics of rupture and return across generations, and (iv) intersectional variation across class, ethnicity, religion, and family forms. We suggest the value of feminist methodologies in research on family firms through institutional ethnography, memory-work, and participatory action research, in order not only to map chains of ruling but also to co-produce institutionally grounded interventions. This commentary calls for shifting from counting women to examining the governance arrangements that structure authority, and therefore moves the field toward genuinely gender-equitable family firms aligned with SDG 5.