From Leading at Home to Leading at Work: Examining Household Labor, Gendered Perceptions of Fairness, and Leadership Outcomes

<jats:p>Despite decades of progress in education and workforce participation, women remain underrepresented in formal leadership roles. Prior research has offered important explanations for this gap, often emphasizing individual preferences, gender bias and stereotypes, or discriminatory organizational practices. While each perspective has merit, individually, they each provide an incomplete account of how leadership decisions are made. In particular, they tend to focus almost exclusively on the workplace, overlooking the broader system in which leadership aspirations develop (for a detailed description of the interinstitutional system, see Bergeron, 2026). In this Research Insights paper, we advance a work-life experiences perspective and argue that leadership decisions are shaped across interconnected domains of work and family. From this view, the home is not merely a background context for leadership development but a central part of the leadership ecosystem — one that shapes time availability, cognitive load, emotional energy, and perceptions of whether taking on additional responsibility is sustainable. A critical and enduring inequality within this ecosystem is the unequal distribution of unpaid household and caregiving labor.</jats:p>