Women Have Already Achieved, So Why Isn't Recognition Equal Yet?

The civil service (ASN) is the largest group of workers managed by a single institution in Indonesia. The National Civil Service Agency recorded 6,546,083 active civil servants in 2025. Of these, 3,590,142, or 55 percent, are women.

In Indonesia's bureaucracy, women are not a minority group. They are the majority, and have been the majority for years.

Yet data presented by Deputy Minister of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection Veronica Tan in July 2026 shows an entirely different picture once we look at leadership seats. Women hold 15.83 percent of junior senior leadership positions (JPT pratama), 16.19 percent of mid level senior leadership positions (JPT madya), and 16.57 percent of top senior leadership positions (JPT utama).

These figures need to be read slowly, because the pattern is not what we would usually expect.

The common assumption is that women's representation shrinks gradually as the level rises, like a narrowing funnel. The JPT data shows something else. All three levels sit in a nearly identical range, around 16 percent, and are even slightly higher at the very top. The biggest drop actually happens before that level even begins.

The gap between making up 55 percent of the civil service population and holding 15.83 percent of JPT pratama seats is around 39 percentage points, and it happens in a single leap. Once a woman succeeds in entering the senior leadership level, her proportion holds relatively steady all the way up. This data does not explain the cause. What it shows is where the break happens, at the entry point into leadership positions, not within the levels themselves.

Aggregate figures from other sources reinforce the same picture. Minister of State Apparatus Empowerment and Bureaucratic Reform Rini Widyantini stated that women's representation in JPT overall is around 17 percent. The National Institute of Public Administration also recorded a similar proportion at a forum held in July 2026, with the composition of female civil servants at around 54 percent. This means about eight out of every ten strategic leadership seats in Indonesia's bureaucracy are still held by men.

What makes this data hard to read any other way is the nature of the career pathway itself. Indonesia's bureaucracy uses an open recruitment system, written rank requirements, and standardized competency assessments. The candidate pool is also available, since women have been the majority of the civil service population for years.

Veronica Tan offered a conclusion that closes off one particular reading. According to her, the gap between the number of female civil servants and their representation in senior leadership positions cannot be explained by capacity alone.

Women are the majority in their organization's population, yet become a sharp numerical minority once they enter the decision making room.

This kind of condition was already mapped out by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in Men and Women of the Corporation (1977). She found that when a group's proportion is highly skewed in a given space, its members are treated as symbols rather than individuals. Their visibility rises sharply, their mistakes are scrutinized more closely, and they feel they must perform perfectly because they are seen as representing their entire group.

What is striking is that this condition can appear in a ministry's leadership meeting room, even though women are the majority in that very same building.

The government itself has already framed this as an issue that needs addressing. The Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection, together with the National Institute of Public Administration, launched the Gender Mainstreaming for Women Leaders Academy in July 2026, a program aimed at strengthening the leadership pathway for female civil servants.

Is this unique to the public sector?

Indonesian women have already entered the labor market, though access remains uneven. According to Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data for August 2025, the female labor force participation rate reached 56.63 percent, compared to 84.4 percent for men.

The good news is that the trend in managerial positions is fairly consistent. In its Indonesia Sustainable Development Goals Indicators 2025 publication, BPS recorded that the proportion of women holding managerial positions reached 35.49 percent in 2024, the highest figure in a decade, up from 22.32 percent in 2015.

At the corporate level, Grant Thornton Indonesia reported in Women in Business 2025 that women's representation in senior management in Indonesia reached 36.3 percent, above the global average of 34 percent. This report is based on a survey of mid market business leaders, so the figure reflects that segment rather than a census of all Indonesian companies.

Then there is a figure that seems to contradict the entire premise of this article. In the same report, women's representation as CEOs in Indonesia was recorded at 28.9 percent in 2025, up from 23.3 percent in 2024, and well above the global average of female CEOs in the same segment, which stood at only 21.7 percent.

If Indonesian women are relatively successful in reaching the CEO seat compared to the global average, does that mean the standard by which they are recognized is already equal?

Data from the same report suggests a more complicated answer. At the C level, Indonesian women are most represented as chief financial officer at 58.9 percent, followed by group corporate secretary at 32.2 percent and chief human resources officer at 31.1 percent. High representation in one leadership indicator does not automatically mean authority is distributed evenly across all functions.

A Similar Pattern in Politics

Women's representation in the Indonesian House of Representatives (DPR RI) for the 2024 to 2029 period reached 22.24 percent, the highest record in Indonesian history. Yet once we look at the leadership seats of the House's Supporting Bodies (Alat Kelengkapan Dewan), the proportion drops to 12.5 percent, or 11 out of 87 leadership positions.

Citing the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2025, Indonesia ranks 97th out of 148 countries with a score of 0.692, up three places from the previous year. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia ranks seventh, trailing behind the Philippines, which ranks 20th globally, as well as Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste.

But that ranking does not mean this issue belongs to Indonesia alone. Globally, the gender gap has been closed by 68.8 percent. What is interesting lies in the breakdown. The gap in health has been closed by 96.2 percent and in education by 95.1 percent, both nearly equal. Meanwhile, economic participation has only closed 61.0 percent of its gap, and political empowerment only 22.9 percent.

This means the dimension that has moved the slowest over two decades of measurement is women's access to power and decision making.

WEF released a dedicated report titled Closing the Gender Gap in Senior Leadership in June 2026, compiled together with the LinkedIn Economic Graph Research Institute and Egon Zehnder. This report separates two things that are often treated as one: how many women are present in leadership ranks, and how much authority they actually hold.

According to LinkedIn data, women hold 24.6 percent of C-suite positions globally. But when looking specifically at CEO seats, that figure drops to 19.1 percent.

The cause becomes visible in the distribution of functions, and the pattern is exactly the same as what we see in Indonesia's data. Women hold about two thirds of chief human resources officer positions, but only about a quarter of chief financial officer and chief operating officer positions, two roles that have historically been the main pathway to the CEO seat. In technology leadership, women make up only 8.6 percent of chief technology officers.

At the board of directors level, the gap widens further. Citing Egon Zehnder data in the same report, women hold 29.3 percent of board seats at the world's largest public companies, nearly double the figure from a decade ago. Yet they hold only about 5 percent of board chair positions.

Even when women reach the top, they stay there for a shorter time. Female CEOs at the largest public companies stay in the role for an average of 3.7 years, while men stay for 5.2 years.

At the top of corporate America, the numbers have indeed broken records. As reported by Fortune in June 2026, 55 women lead Fortune 500 companies this year, or 11 percent of the list, the highest proportion in the list's 72 year history. At the global scale, only 34 Fortune Global 500 companies, or 6.8 percent, are led by women.

If women have the capacity and have already entered the workforce, why is the path upward different?

The Women in the Workplace 2025 report from McKinsey & Company together with LeanIn.Org, published in December 2025 and now in its 11th year, compiled data from 124 organizations in the United States and Canada employing around three million people, along with a survey of 9,500 employees.

For the first time in eleven years, the report recorded an ambition gap. As many as 80 percent of women said they wanted to be promoted to the next level, compared to 86 percent of men.

That finding is very easy to misread. A skeptical reader would immediately conclude that women simply have less ambition. Three pieces of data in the same report push back against that reading.

First, career commitment was recorded as equal between women and men at every level. Second, and this is the most important part, the report found that when women receive the same career support as men, that ambition gap disappears completely. Third, that career support is in fact not given equally. At the entry level, only 31 percent of women have a sponsor, compared to 45 percent of men.

The consequence is measurable at the very first step up, which McKinsey calls the broken rung. For every 100 men promoted to manager level in 2025, only 93 women received a comparable promotion. That figure drops to 74 for women of color.

The gap at that first step is cumulative. The fewer women who make it past that point, the smaller the pool of female candidates for the next promotion, and the gap compounds at every level after that. At the C-suite, women hold 29 percent of positions, a figure that has not moved since 2024.

The WEF 2026 report adds another layer. Women were recorded as 55.2 percent more likely to take a career break than men, mostly due to caregiving responsibilities. This is the burden that Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung already mapped out back in 1989 through the term second shift, meaning a first shift at the office and a second shift at home consisting of unpaid domestic work. If readiness to lead is still tied to an uninterrupted career, women who take breaks more often may face additional barriers before entering the leadership level.

This pattern is not a new discovery. Social scientists mapped it out long before corporate pipeline data became available, and two frameworks explain most directly what we have seen above.

Role congruity theory. Alice Eagly and Steven Karau formulated this theory in Psychological Review in 2002. Its starting point is the perceived mismatch between women's gender role and the leader role. Society associates women with communal traits such as warmth, cooperation, and nurturing, while the ideal leader is associated with agentic traits such as assertiveness, dominance, and competitiveness.

Eagly and Karau showed that this mismatch produces two different forms of prejudice. The first form is that women are judged as less suited to be leadership candidates. The second form, which is often overlooked, is that behavior that actually meets the demands of the leader role is judged more negatively when a woman is the one doing it.

The first form helps explain why the biggest break in the civil service data occurs at the entry point into leadership positions, the exact moment when someone is judged fit or unfit to lead. The second form explains something that no theory of competence alone can explain. A woman can be penalized precisely when she displays effective leadership behavior.

Double bind. Catalyst documented the practical consequences of this in a report titled The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don't in 2007, built from a study of business leaders in the United States and Western Europe. The report identified three traps.

Extreme perceptions: women are judged as either too soft or too tough, and rarely seen as just right. High competence threshold: female leaders face higher standards with lower rewards compared to men. Competent but disliked: women who clearly display leadership skills tend to be less well liked.

The second trap gives context to the gap visible at that first step up.

Two accomplished women from very different worlds illustrate these two mechanisms fairly clearly. They are not proof of the theory. They are human illustrations of the mechanism already shown by the research and data above.

Back to Agnez Mo. What she described was not simply the feeling of having to work harder, but the experience of women needing to show more convincing results before being seen as worthy. In gender studies, this condition is known as the high competence threshold, when women face higher competence demands to receive the same recognition.

There is one important point to note. In the same interview, Agnez said that at that point in her career she no longer felt the need to prove herself to others. She was speaking about what she has seen happening in her industry, not complaining that she herself still feels inadequate. Precisely because of that, her account is compelling: she was describing a pattern she has observed from within an industry she has worked in for years.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Indonesia's former Minister of Finance, takes us one layer deeper. She became Indonesia's first female Minister of Finance in 2005 and served again until September 2025, and now serves as Independent Chair of the World Bank's IDA22 fundraising.

At the Women Leaders Forum 2022, as reported by Liputan6, she explained that when a woman is appointed to a position, she is expected to prove that she truly deserves it. To achieve something, she said, women sometimes need to show themselves to be twice as good as their male counterparts.

The second part of her testimony is what makes it far more valuable. At the same forum, as summarized by Dewi Magazine, she described a dilemma rarely faced by men. When she acted decisively, she was seen as too controlling. When she paid attention to detail, she was called nitpicky. When she demanded performance and target achievement, she was seen as too pushy. Traits that in another context would be read as leadership qualities turned into negative labels.

That is no longer just about the standard of proof. It is a description of the second form of prejudice formulated by Eagly and Karau: behavior that meets the demands of the leader role is judged more negatively when performed by a woman. That testimony also comes from someone who led a state institution for nearly two decades, within the very bureaucratic ecosystem whose data we have just examined.

For brands and marketers. The most useful question is not how many women appear in a campaign. The question is who is given authority. Data on functional segregation shows that women can be present in large numbers while still remaining far from positions seen as having authority, and that pattern can be replicated in brand communication without anyone noticing.

What can be audited: whether women are shown as experts or as talent, as decision makers or as consumers, and who receives credit for the success of an initiative. Catalyst's findings add one more point. Pay attention to whether women in campaign materials are always required to be portrayed as warm, perfect, and inspiring, while women who are assertive or ambitious are automatically given a negative frame.

For companies and HR. This is the area most strongly backed by evidence. If women are not lacking in career commitment, and the ambition gap shrinks once support is given equally, then the most impactful intervention lies at that first step up.

What can be examined: promotion rates to manager level by gender, who gets access to strategic projects, the availability of sponsors and mentors at the early level, who gets exposure to senior leadership, and whether leadership potential criteria are applied consistently.

For policy. The JPT data points to a fairly specific point of intervention, namely the transition from functional or administrator positions into the senior leadership level. Beyond that, the focus should be on what keeps women on the path toward decision making positions: pay transparency, access to childcare, maternity and parental leave, work flexibility, protection from discrimination, and regular monitoring of representation in senior leadership positions.

Women have already entered the workforce, already reached managerial positions in a steadily rising proportion, and already occupy the top seat in a number of organizations. In Indonesia's bureaucracy, they are even the majority.

The available data does not show that women's low representation at the leadership level can be explained by capacity or ambition alone. McKinsey's 2025 research shows that once career support is given equally, the ambition gap disappears completely.

What remains unequal are three other things. Access to the first step up toward leadership. The standard of proof applied before someone is considered worthy. And how a behavior is read once a woman is the one performing it.

The pace of change is also not yet convincing. Grant Thornton estimates that gender parity in senior management in the mid market will not be reached until 2051, and in the Women in Business 2026 edition, the proportion of women in senior management globally dropped to 32.9 percent from 34 percent the year before.

Agnez Mo gave us popular language for an experience. Sri Mulyani showed how that standard operates at the highest level of leadership. Gender studies explain why both of their experiences can arise, and the 2025 to 2026 data shows that the structural pattern has not gone away.

The question is not how to make women stronger. They have already shown the ability to get there, and in Indonesia's bureaucracy they have even become the majority running it. The question is why the path has not yet been made equal.

References

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Dewi Magazine. (n.d.). Sri Mulyani bicara soal stereotip pemimpin perempuan di lingkungan kerja. Retrieved August 26, 2026, from https://www.dewimagazine.com/profile/sri-mulyani-bicara-soal-stereotip-pemimpin-perempuan-di-lingkungan-kerja

Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109(3), 573 to 598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.3.573

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Fortune. (2026, August 3). A record 34 women now run Fortune Global 500 companies. That's still just 6.8%. Retrieved August 26, 2026, from https://fortune.com/2026/08/03/fortune-global-500-female-ceos-2026-elevance-health/

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Grant Thornton International. (2026). Women in Business 2026: The value of visibility. Grant Thornton International Ltd. Retrieved August 26, 2026, from https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/articles/insights/2026/women-in-business

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