To explore the impact and underlying mechanisms of gender of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) on exploratory innovation, this study analyzes how CEOs with different gender implement exploratory innovation based on the attention-based view. Specifically, we introduce attention to cooperative innovation and attention to independent innovation as two mediation mechanisms and constructs a theoretical framework for the relationship between CEOs' gender, attention to innovation, and exploratory innovation. Based on this framework, integrating the principles of structural distribution of attention in the attention-based view, we examine the contingent effects of internal board composition structure on the process of attention allocation, and find that the proportion of directors with technical background positively moderates the relationship between CEOs' gender and attention to cooperative innovation. This study makes important theoretical contributions to gender research and the attention-based view.
