Counting Women, Keeping Men in Power? Gender and Governance in Family Firms

This commentary unsettles the "add-women-and-stir" fix and recenters gendered power in family firms as a question of governance, not headcounts. We read 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 show that willingness is often shaped by masculinity-contest norms that frame equality work as status-threatening, while ability is 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 around (i) the "ideal-heir" script, (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 call for the use 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 rights-bearing interventions. Shifting from counting women to remaking rules moves the field toward genuinely gender-just family firms aligned with SDG 5.