From Presence to Policy: The Conditional Impact of Women's Representation in Top Management Teams in Chinese Local Governments

ABSTRACT While public administration research has begun exploring the impact of women's representation in top leadership positions in public organizations, the conditions under which women's representation in top management teams (TMTs) produces policies specifically benefiting women remain underexamined. Using a panel dataset covering 276 Chinese municipalities (2010–2018), this study examines how women's representation in mayoral teams affects women‐sensitive policy adoption. Fixed‐effects Poisson regression analyses suggest that TMTs with two or more women leaders are likely to adopt more women‐sensitive policies than TMTs with no or a single woman leader. This relationship strengthens when women occupy a larger proportion of provincial leadership roles, but it weakens when TMTs maintain stronger patronage ties to provincial male leaders. These findings advance representative bureaucracy research by demonstrating how passive representation translates into active representation in government upper echelons from a team‐based perspective and how this effect is contingent on institutional factors within a multi‐level governance system.