Abstract
Masculinist contours have legitimized male domination in Indonesia’s upper public service ranks. However, some women have managed to crack the glass ceiling. A systematic search was undertaken of seven academic databases and the Google Scholar search engine to identify facilitative features of women’s career advancement through Indonesia’s echelon ranks. Fourteen articles, representing nine studies, were identified. While policy initiatives exist to increase women’s representation and career advancement, studies consistently identified little application to practice. Patterns across the studies located women’s career advancement as an individual concern and showed that women wanting careers were expected to manage the double burden of productive and reproductive life, obtain permissions from husbands and extended family, and adopt masculine leadership traits to garner colleagues’ support. Barriers frequently outweigh opportunities for career advancement; these including entrenched homo-sociability asserting that men make better leaders. Consequently, the blocking of women’s opportunities invoked personal disappointments, resulting in women’s public denial of their leadership ambitions.
Highlights
More than 4.5 million people are employed in Indonesia’s public service, which represents approximately 1.7 percent of the population (World Bank 2018)
Suharto’s New Order-era (1967–1998) favored a masculinist-authoritarian leadership style that biased the appointment of men into strategic senior public service positions (Tidey 2018)
What are the strategies of Indonesian women who have succeeded with career advancement to the upper echelons?
Summary
More than 4.5 million people are employed in Indonesia’s public service, which represents approximately 1.7 percent of the population (World Bank 2018). Suharto’s New Order-era (1967–1998) favored a masculinist-authoritarian leadership style that biased the appointment of men into strategic senior public service positions (Tidey 2018). According to Tidey (2018), public service appointments to senior positions during the Suharto regime were predominantly based on favoritism towards men with political and family connections to power and who were loyal allies in corruption, as opposed to merit. It is more than two decades since Suharto’s demise. Accompanying decentralization, Law No 43/1999 proclaimed a merit-based human resource approach for employing
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