The early working experience of local officials will influence their subsequent administrative behaviour. Based on the relevant data of principal officials of prefecture-level cities in China from 2000 to 2015, this study investigates the impact of previous working experiences on Officials’ behaviours after taking office. This article shows that compared to municipal party secretaries without working experiences in state-owned enterprises, in secretaries’ jurisdictions who once worked in state-owned enterprises, counties are lesslikely to have female party secretaries or mayors. Further analysis shows that this effect is more significant among party secretaries with working experience in local state-owned enterprises, while the working experience in central state-owned enterprises has no significant negative effect. Besides, since 2011, the central government' s regulation on the proportion of women in local government leadership has reduced this negative effect. A possible explanation is that working experience in state-owned enterprises might make officials more focused on numerical type, extensive growth of the local economy, while women officials tend to pay more attention to some other soft development indicators. This study provides new insights for understanding the behaviour patterns of political elites and the gender composition of grassroots bureaucrats in China.