Women remain underrepresented in executive ranks despite evidence that companies with female leaders outperform those with males at the top. The scarcity of females in these leadership positions has led researchers in a variety of fields to suggest that the human capital resource portfolios of women who do manage to crack through the ceiling to the highest level in the C-suite are valuable, rare and inimitable, bringing competitive advantages to their organization. Yet, research shows that women leaders have differences in the way they use their human capital compared to their male counterparts, which makes them strategically valuable whether they are a minority or not. This begs the question, what if women were not underrepresented in the leadership ranks – would they still outperform male leaders? Further, in such a context, are the ways in which men and women leaders use their human capital to achieve high performance different or do they converge? This paper seeks to address these questions, using an abductive approach with configurational set theoretic methods. Our empirical analyses with a sample of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 Women’s Basketball coaches supports previous findings that suggest team performance is not significantly influenced by the head coach’s gender. However, our configurational approach reveals that the ways in which female and male coaches bundle their human capital attributes to lead their teams to successful performance are different. Further, there are multiple equally effective bundles for both male and female coaches. Our findings expand theoretical understanding about how both men and women leaders create value for their organizations and provide important implications for practice.