While sociologists have previously looked at the phenomena of increased female employment in the United States, little is understood about the main mechanisms by which men and women eventually came to work alongside each other in previously male-dominated fields. More recently, the economy of Saudi Arabia has seen a dramatic shift in female labor force participation from 2-20% female employment in the private sector in the last decade. Exploiting this natural setting for understanding organizational change, I analyze the universe of private sector employer-employee matched data from Saudi Arabia from 2009-2016 and find that firms which hired female managers were more likely to continue hiring females than firms that did not hire a female manager. To better understand this finding in the administrative data, I combine two years of qualitative fieldwork to unpack how hiring a first female manager operates as a signal of cultural change to other firms and provides role models for female jobseekers. In addition, I find that commitment from top management explains how firms began hiring females, and that they used a variety of strategies to do so, which I categorize as from within, from without, and rotational strategies. By understanding the phenomena of increased female employment in Saudi Arabia we can bring these insights to organizations in other male-dominated contexts.