What the Review Covers
A structured review published on 11 October 2026 in the journal SN Social Sciences takes stock of a familiar imbalance: across Asia, women hold a small share of leadership roles in government, business and regulation, despite decades of growth and rising female education. Fahd Ali Raza led the work, with co-authors Abtar Darshan Singh and Rabia Anwar at the Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation in Kuala Lumpur, and Vaikunthan Rajaratnam at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in Singapore. The team synthesised peer reviewed studies, review literature and institutional evidence, appraised each source for methodological transparency and relevance, and grouped the findings by barrier type.
Three Barriers, One Labyrinth
The barriers fall into three linked families. Socio-cultural pressure includes deeply rooted patriarchal norms and what the paper calls the “double burden”, professional duties stacked on top of caregiving at home. Institutional obstacles run from biased promotion processes to workplace cultures that shut people out and limited access to mentors. The reviewers’ frame is the notable part: they reject the comfortable notion of a passive “leaky pipeline”, in which women simply drift away, and describe active exclusionary mechanisms instead, better captured by the labyrinth metaphor, an image with its own lineage in the academic study of women leaders.
The review works from an intersectional feminist framework, an approach its reference list traces to Crenshaw’s 1989 writing on race and sex. The sources range wide: studies of Dalit women in Indian local government sit alongside work on universities in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, career development in Vietnamese manufacturing, and opposition leaders in Indonesia and South Korea. Gender discrimination, the authors find, compounds with additional marginalization along lines of caste, class, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation, so disadvantage stacks rather than merely adds.
The Numbers, and the Quotas
The spread inside Asia is wider than the gap between Asia and the rest of the world. Senior management representation runs from 18.4% in Japan, the low end, to 37.4% in Vietnam, the high end. On policy, the verdict on gender quotas is mixed, with results turning on cultural context and on the quality of implementation. For all the noise around boardroom quotas, the sober finding is that they are neither useless nor decisive. The salient point, the authors argue, is that no isolated fix closes the leadership gap; the strategies with the best record pair regulatory mandates handed down from above with cultural change pushed from below.
The review generated no new primary data and drew no dedicated funding. It appears in Volume 6 of the journal as article 522, and beyond the abstract the full text sits behind a subscription wall.
