Leadership Quote by Ingvar Kamprad

Kamprad’s line flatters women with one hand and tethers them to the domestic sphere with the other. It’s a businessman’s argument for gender inclusion that can’t quite stop thinking like a traditionalist: women should run companies, he implies, because they already run households. The cleverness is its pragmatism. He isn’t invoking justice or equality; he’s invoking competence, framed through the most culturally legible arena where women have long been granted authority without power.

The subtext is IKEA-clear: the home is the center of consumption, and the person who “decides almost everything in the home” is the person who decides what gets bought, replaced, upgraded. So “more women in management” becomes not just a moral gesture but a market strategy. If your brand sells domestic life at scale, elevating the demographic that shapes domestic decisions sounds less like feminism and more like product research with a corner office.

Yet the line also reveals the limits of that logic. It assumes women’s influence is natural, continuous, and primarily household-bound; it doesn’t imagine women as decision-makers in finance, infrastructure, or politics on their own terms. It’s empowerment via stereotype: yes to authority, but only if it’s justified by caretaking.

Context matters: Kamprad built a retail empire by democratizing design and pitching the home as a project you manage. This quote maps that worldview onto leadership: management as household administration, scaled up. It’s both a nod to women’s real, often unpaid expertise and a reminder of how easily corporate “inclusion” gets sold as efficiency rather than emancipation.