Why Women-Led Case Studies Belong in Every Business Classroom

It’s 9 a.m. on a Monday morning. Your business students have settled into the classroom. You feel they’re prepared to discuss the case assigned for the day, but you sense something different. Eyes lock, people lean in, not just because the stakes are high, but because the person at the critical decision point looks different from the typical case protagonist. The decision maker in this case is a woman.

What makes this moment stand out is how uncommon it still is. Because women leaders are underrepresented as case protagonists, business classrooms typically default to teaching a narrower range of leadership experiences.

But classrooms don’t have to default to this. As Wood et al. argue in Teaching with Cases, 4th Edition, instructors should provide a variety of case study protagonists over the duration of a course so that every student, regardless of their gender identity, age, or background, can find someone to identify with. In practice, one reliable way to deliver this variety is to feature women not as one-dimensional symbols or statistics, but as leaders with agency making consequential decisions that affect positive change.

Case studies featuring women leaders broaden the range of leadership situations students encounter and expand the scope of their experience. These are leadership cases, not diversity-focused or issue-driven ones, with women making real decisions that shape outcomes. They belong in every business classroom.

The impact in the classroom

Business instructors see two immediate payoffs from incorporating women-led case studies into the curriculum: expanded mental models of who leads, and a sharper analysis of how we evaluate leadership.

Zoe Kinias, Ivey Business School Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Sustainability, and co-author of the IWIL award-winning case study, The Longest Job Interview: Yasmene McDaniel's Dilemma as Interim CEO, regularly integrates women-led case studies across HBA, MBA, and executive education simply because it enables her students at all levels to include women in their mental models of leadership.

Kinias notes that seeing identifiable role models reduces concerns about confirming negative gender stereotypes and increases women’s job satisfaction, a conclusion highlighted in her academic research.

“I believe it is critically important for women and girls across career stages to have opportunities to see themselves in top leadership models,” she says. “This has potential to both normalize women's leadership experiences for the men and women who work with women, and also to help women more vividly imagine themselves stepping into and successfully navigating leadership challenges.”

Felicia A. Henderson, co-author of The Longest Job Interview case study, and Lecturer and Programme Co-Director of the Advancing Diversity and Inclusion programme at INSEAD Business School, reinforces that cases with women leads have profound impact on many levels.

“Seeing [women] as case protagonists increases visibility and invites learners to observe and reflect on the prevalence of women leaders in their organizations,” Henderson says.

That visibility also changes how students question decisions, and makes it easier for them to spot when reactions to women leaders are judged by a different standard.

“Having a concrete case where a woman's leadership can be observed and analyzed allows learners to ask whether this general finding is always true, and to interrogate factors that may make it true in some cases.”

The student perspective

Ivey HBA1 student Anusha Imam estimates that she has read about 200 cases in her first year. As a student in Kinias’s Leading People and Organizations course, she discussed The Longest Job Interview case study.

“This wasn’t the first [case study] with a woman protagonist, but it was one of the only ones where identity played a key role in my understanding. And she was a CEO at the end of the day,” Imam says.

Cases like this one invite Imam to weigh interim status, sponsorship, and succession alongside the lived experience that shaped interim CEO Yasmene McDaniel’s decisions. For maximum impact, Imam notes that it is most effective to “put business leadership at the forefront and keep identity where it shapes judgment. That’s how these cases teach best.”

For students who don’t share the protagonist’s experience, she argues that the impact is just as relevant: “It’s incredibly important that people who haven’t had this lived experience get to read about it,” she says. “The case combines the business component of a CEO decision with something they should consider further, and maybe it helps them foster a more intersectional approach to their careers.”

Ivey HBA1 student Ryan Castellarin was also in Kinias’s course. He feels that working through McDaniel’s experience reframed resistance for him. “I assumed that if people weren’t immediately on board with my leadership, something was wrong with me. McDaniel’s story shifted that,” he says. “Resistance isn’t a verdict on your leadership; sometimes it’s just the reality of stepping into a role where you must prove yourself, especially when you don’t fit the mould people expect.”

That reframing of treating early resistance as a normal reaction to understanding a situation rather than an overt criticism, shapes how student leaders approach the next team or meeting.

Strategic authorship and teaching with impact

When case authors design for leadership decisions, and instructors deliver cases centred on women, three general patterns show up in class: empathy, male awareness, and evaluation of leadership independent of gender.

Tanisha Juneja, Ivey HBA ’25 and Consultant, Business Transformation at EY, co-authored the IWIL award-winning case study Untangle Money: Wealth for Every Woman. She says that she “intentionally highlighted female case protagonist Kristine Beese’s distinct leadership considerations, which focused not only on profitability but on genuinely helping women navigate and feel more confident in their financial decisions.”

That intent allows female students to envision themselves at the centre of the story making a difficult choice. They look to the protagonist as a role model, navigating complexity and growth, and testing legitimate leadership priorities they can apply in practice.

“In developing the case, we wanted to show how leadership decisions were shaped by empathy and a deep understanding of the barriers many women face when engaging with financial systems,” Juneja says.

For male students, women-led cases broaden their awareness and generate questions that male leaders wouldn’t necessarily extract: What does credibility look like when it isn’t automatically granted? How does sponsorship work in practice? Why do some leaders have to prove themselves over a longer period of time before people take note?

“My hope is that greater exposure to women leaders normalizes women in these roles for both men and women, and that leadership becomes detached from gender,” says Untangle Money co-author, Miranda Goode, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Ivey Business School.

And for business students in general, women-led case studies simply make the classroom experience better.

“One of my male peers started his contribution with, ‘If I was a mother…’. The class laughed, but it showed how many peers respect and admire the emotional, domestic, and career labour women carry. I still remember who said it and what they said,” Imam says. “It adds another layer to the decision point and really gets people thinking, which is a critical component in the 21st century.”

From Classroom to Case Creation

As more instructors look to bring this kind of representation into their classrooms, the question becomes how to expand what’s available. Initiatives like the Ivey Women Investing in Leadership (IWIL) Case Writing Competition are part of that effort, encouraging case authors to contribute cases that reflect the realities, challenges, and impact of women in leadership, and to place women at the centre of leadership decisions.

Selected cases are shared through Ivey Publishing’s global network, helping bring these stories into classrooms around the world.

The Ivey Women Investing in Leadership (IWIL) Case Writing Competition is now in its second year, with submissions open until July 13, 2026.

Log in or create an educator account to browse the winners of the first year or explore the entire Ivey Publishing catalogue of learning materials.