Across the two studies in my dissertation, I investigated the responsiveness of female CEOs to bottom-up attentional factors and their impact on two strategic outcomes - CSR and innovation. I hypothesized that female CEOs would be more responsive to evaluators' guidance, resulting in greater variations in strategic outcomes in female-led firms than male-led firms. Specifically, I focused on how evaluators would affect CEOs' risk propensity, temporal orientation, and stakeholder orientation, which tend to be gender-specific and associated with CSR and innovation. I asserted that examining these theoretical arguments would more effectively explain gender's effect on CSR and innovation. As hypothesized, I found that female CEOs showed higher responsiveness to bottom-up factors than male CEOs. However, they were responsive to different factors across CSR and innovation. In the CSR chapter, female CEOs showed higher sensitivity to media stakeholder focus. On the other hand, the innovation chapter demonstrated female CEOs' higher responsiveness toward stock options and analysts' adverse ratings. These findings suggest that executives, especially female executives, tend to respond differently to bottom-up factors according to the context they are situated in. The degree to which a strategic action is tightly related to a firm's financial performance is likely to determine whether female executives respond to their previously overlooked bottom-up factors.
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