Drawing on the paradoxical perspectives regarding the influence of female leadership on workplace outcomes, particularly for female subordinates, we provide a comprehensive synthesis of the literature to conceptualize whether and how the presence of female leadership benefits lower-level employees of the same gender. Our integrative conceptual framework proposes the positive implications of female leadership representation on female subordinates, identifies the mediating role of interpersonal and organizational support, and further considers how country-, occupation-, and job-level factors moderate these effects. We test predictions from this framework using meta-analytic techniques on a sample of 130 studies. Our findings reveal that while female subordinates tend to exhibit more favorable attitudes toward female leaders compared to male subordinates, female leadership representation, in general, is positively while weakly related with workplace outcomes of female subordinates. We identify enhanced organizational support rather than interpersonal support as a key mediator explaining why female subordinates benefit from greater female leadership representation. Furthermore, these benefits are amplified in countries with lower gender equality, in more prestigious occupations, and when female leaders hold higher-ranked positions or when there is a greater hierarchical distance between female leaders and their subordinates. Despite these advantages, we find no evidence that female leaders favor female employees over male employees.
