Around the world, cultures have different conceptions of sex and gender. The term “gender identity” may be controversial, though it remains a foundational construct of humanity. It is so important that we seek to know the biological sex of our children in utero, so we can begin assigning gendered norms to the colors they wear, the jobs they may attain and their “acceptable” social interactions (Fletcher, 1998; Correll and Ridgeway, 2003). Gender bias endures less because men and women are seen as different compared to because those differences are ranked. Masculine-coded traits are culturally socialized as more competent and desirable, a status belief that quietly sustains gender hierarchy (Correll, 2004; Martin, 2004; Risman, 2004).
In public administration, leadership and nonprofit research, such assumptions align gender with sex assigned at birth and constrain understanding of how leadership is shaped by identity and institutional context (Kennedy et al., 2020; Talis, 2024). Efforts for women's equality and representation in public leadership under this binary definition have been widely evaluated. The International Journal of Public Leadership has encouraged further investigation through this special issue, broadly entitled “Gender Identity and Public and Nonprofit Management,” which poses a key question: Does formal action by women and gender-diverse individuals in public leadership positions translate into power?
According to UN Women, as of January 2026, only 28 countries have a woman as the head of state or government. At this rate, women would only reach parity with men in another 130 years (UN Women, 2026, March 11). In legislative bodies, 27.5% of parliamentarians are women globally; at the local level, across the 147 countries surveyed, about a third are women on average, though this varies by region (see Figure 1).
The bar graph compares the average percentage of women serving as local government leaders across various regions. The graph features seven horizontal bars, each representing a different region. The regions listed on the y-axis from top to bottom are Central and Southern Asia, Europe and Northern America, Oceania, Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Asia and Northern Africa. The x-axis represents the percentage values ranging from 0% to 50%. Central and Southern Asia has the highest percentage at 41%, followed by Europe and Northern America at 37%, and Oceania at 35%. Eastern and South-Eastern Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean both have 31%. Sub-Saharan Africa stands at 26%, and Western Asia and Northern Africa has the lowest percentage at 19%. The bars are colored blue, and each bar is labeled with its respective percentage value. All values are approximated.Source: Data derived from UN Women, Women in Local Government. Data as of 1 January 2025
The bar graph compares the average percentage of women serving as local government leaders across various regions. The graph features seven horizontal bars, each representing a different region. The regions listed on the y-axis from top to bottom are Central and Southern Asia, Europe and Northern America, Oceania, Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Asia and Northern Africa. The x-axis represents the percentage values ranging from 0% to 50%. Central and Southern Asia has the highest percentage at 41%, followed by Europe and Northern America at 37%, and Oceania at 35%. Eastern and South-Eastern Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean both have 31%. Sub-Saharan Africa stands at 26%, and Western Asia and Northern Africa has the lowest percentage at 19%. The bars are colored blue, and each bar is labeled with its respective percentage value. All values are approximated.Source: Data derived from UN Women, Women in Local Government. Data as of 1 January 2025
Viewing this through the lens of representative bureaucracy theory, the world is failing women. Women's voices bring diversity and lived experience to policy debates and the distribution of resources to areas of need overlooked by patriarchal systems (Adusah-Karikari and Ohemeng, 2014; An et al., 2022; Kennedy et al., 2020; Uttermark et al., 2024). What is additionally difficult is there are questions regarding how much impact women have even when they are present. Cultural norms, importance placed on educating women and other social challenges are barriers that make women's passive representation, simply their presence and representation within a group, lack active representation or power to impact the processes and outcomes, whereby the interests of individuals identifying as women are represented (Keiser et al., 2002). Many of the articles in this special issue address the act of moving passive representation to active representation.
In nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)/nonprofits, leaders are sometimes more public-facing than governmental leaders, often providing services directly to their clients. Women, while better represented in nonprofit leadership roles such as executive leadership in the USA (Clerkin et al., 2024), remain under-represented on boards of the largest, most well-funded organizations (Lee, 2019). Dula (2022) in the USA and He et al. (2026) in China find that more women on nonprofit boards of directors correlate with increased funding for women- and girl-serving organizations and greater provision of services to that population. Representation in these cases seems to shift from passive to active. However, this issue addresses a more recent issue facing nonprofit governance and leadership – how do gender diverse leaders fair in the US NGO sector? Cisgender women are not the only identity group struggling to gain leadership acceptance. While some contend gender identity is solely binary, gender-diverse individuals exist and have always existed, globally and across different social roles (Fontenele and Abi Zeid Daou, 2025). Recently, in the USA and the UK, for example, transgender and gender-diverse individuals have faced extreme social and legislative discrimination (Blessett and Meyer, 2026). Kennedy et al. (2020) argue that representative bureaucracy scholarship “rel[ies] predominantly on binary gender variables” (p. 1101) and calls explicitly for research that “acknowledge[s] gender as nonbinary” (p. 1112). There are no comparable statistics on transgender or gender-diverse public leadership to those UN Women provides, making this issue's research especially valuable to gender leadership studies. Given the political climate in countries like the USA, where laws directly target how transgender citizens can exist and how can transgender and gender-diverse individuals lead and serve their clients while policies target them and their work.
The articles in this special issue explore gender and leadership around the globe, examining access to leadership roles and the external barriers to fulfilling them. Challenges remain for women and gender-diverse individuals to fully realize representation in leadership and translate it into substantive effects. Through the eight research articles included here, three major themes emerge.
Formal inclusion doesn't necessarily produce substantive power. Gains from leadership participation by women and gender-diverse people are complicated by the cultural expectations they must navigate, and the resulting gaps may not close simply with increased representation and time.
Gender-as-binary-variable increasingly fails to explain the data across these articles, whether through intersectional analysis, cultural specificity or gender-diverse identity itself.
Representative gains throughout these articles may be reversible or tenuous amid political and social upheaval. Cultural backlash to gains by women and gender-diverse individuals has caused real harm to rights and safety, and these issues must be consciously navigated.
First, the majority of articles in this issue provide evidence that while increases are being made in the percentage of public leadership positions held by cisgender women, this does not always translate into the active representation desired. These findings appear across different institutional and regional settings. Akahome and Oputa's (2026) study on Nigeria details one mechanism for leaders to build active representation beyond mere numbers. They focus on relationship-building, mentorship and reframing issues of inclusion as a means to gain influence in the policy process. Their framework of Quiet Institutional Change is used to show gains made through negotiated power but predominantly highlights cultural change as a means of achieving substantive success, rather than representation alone. Bhat's (2026) study of Kashmiri women elected to District Development Councils under India's 73rd Amendment shows that while women are filling government seats, they are not gaining equal decision-making power. Yaghi et al. (2025) find that while both men and women respondents to their survey of public and private employees in the United Arab Emirates held similarly positive views of women managers, there was less support for structural changes, like quotas, to ensure representation. Also focusing on the Gulf region, Atef (2026) finds that even with women adapting their leadership styles to balance social norms of feminine and masculine styles, women remain at a disadvantage in achieving roles where they may have influence on strategic decision-making or organizational direction. The specific strategies women use to assert influence inside structurally constrained systems are established in a typology by Aoki and Sila (2026). While women Indonesian legislative leaders may hold these roles, they must manage their identities to overcome cultural and institutional challenges due to their gender. While these four articles are qualitative, Wasaratchawet and Dash's (2026) panel study of eight ASEAN states attempts to show quantitatively that women's representation and civil rights are bidirectionally affected – as women's representation improves, so do women's civil rights, and as women's civil rights improve, so does women's representation. The women analyzed in these articles are not passive in their pursuit of influence, though presence alone has not been enough to secure it.
The second major theme across this issue is that binary studies of gender are not substantial enough alone to explain influence in public leadership. A binary man/woman approach to gender is not sufficient as it ignores gender-diverse identities and other individual characteristics that interact with gender to influence attitudes toward and outcomes of public leadership. Talis studies gender-diverse (nonbinary, trans and nonbinary/genderfluid, trans man, trans woman and queer) public leaders outside the cisgender-dominant social norms in the US public service. These gender-diverse groups feel they must adjust their approaches to client services and leadership in ways outside of just man/woman considerations. The intersectionality of identities is apparent in Bhat (2026) and Yaghi et al. (2025). Bhat's (2026) work specifically frames their argument around a gender–class conflict zone interaction, while Yaghi et al. (2025) find that other identities, such as nationality, education and experience levels, are more correlated than gender alone. Aoki and Sila (2026) and Akahome and Oputa (2026) align with this theme as well. While this issue's articles stem from all over the globe, these pieces both reject a global definition of masculinity and femininity across all cultures. They reject treating African and Indonesian institutions as inherently aligned with Western systems in terms of gender and norms. Each of the articles in this theme highlights the limitations we face when using a singular definition of man and woman and that research frequently sits in Western norms and theoretical approaches.
Finally, the third theme pushes gendered public leadership further in that these articles ask, “What happens when there is backlash to participation?” Khurana (2026) and Talis (2026) highlight the backlash to transgender and gender-diverse individuals and services currently occurring in the USA. While Talis (2026) focuses specifically on individual leaders' behavioral choices, Khurana (2026) highlights institutional responses leaders must make to continue to enact their missions. Khurana's focus on NGOs that serve the transgender population is unique in telling a story not of mission-drift – when the promise of resources pushes for programming that does not quite align with one's mission – but mission “clamp” – a situation where leaders adjust their service strategies in light of political backlash to still help their clients. Wasaratchawet and Dash (2026) highlight the Thai coup that checked women's participation as a by-product of its overall authoritarian effects. While this is not a targeted gender policy, it still shows the impact of uncertain political circumstances.
This special issue gathers research on gendered public leadership from around the world: Nigeria to Indonesia, Kashmir to the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf region more broadly, the ASEAN region to the USA. Three patterns hold. This research highlights similar barriers to full leadership representation and leadership styles across nations and also details successes achieved incrementally. While gender theories used in public leadership studies often stem from Western conceptions of gender norms, this research reflects cultural variation, showing that geographic-specific cultural frameworks are necessary alongside measures to include women in public leadership roles. Despite these challenges, none of the women and gender-diverse leaders described here are passive recipients of these constraints. The continual finding, arrived at independently across drastically different contexts, is one of strategic and adaptive agency.
Future research avenues are many. The majority of the research here is qualitative and rich but missing panel data that would highlight more causal mechanisms. Data collection at this level is a challenge but worth investigating. Point-in-time interviews do not show whether the leadership styles or strategies used by women and gender-diverse individuals are effective in the long run in helping them be active participants in leadership roles. Next, research highlighting gender-diverse leaders and contexts is only set in the USA. Gender diversity is not a localized phenomenon, though taboos on open transgender or gender-diverse identities exist globally as well as in the USA. Gender is an historic division, and its social dimensions impact both public leaders and who they serve. This special issue is a valuable extension of global gender and leadership studies, building on theory and expanding it, while asking valuable questions the next round of scholars should seek to answer.
