Abstract

RODRIGUEZ-SAAVEDRA, Miluska Odely et al. Women in public administration: barriers and opportunities for women's leadership. Revista InveCom [online]. 2025, vol.5, n.4, e504068.  Epub June 25, 2025. ISSN 2739-0063.  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14854296.

This study aimed to analyze the barriers and opportunities that women face in achieving female leadership in government institutions, both national and international. The research adopted a qualitative approach with a phenomenological method, applying semi-structured interviews to a sample of 879 female leaders selected from a population of 4,950. The sample was determined by seeking saturation of the data corpus. The participants came from both national (68%) and foreign (32%) institutions, including ministries, multilateral organizations and international cooperation agencies. Likewise, women with at least two years of experience in management positions in ministries (45%), multilateral organizations (30%) and international agencies (25%) were included. The Atlas.ti program was used for data analysis, including the code network, frequency and word cloud. In addition, the Sankey Co-occurrence Diagram allowed to visualize the relationships between the barriers and the facilitating factors of female leadership. The results showed that gender discrimination, deep-rooted stereotypes and the lack of effective work-family reconciliation policies are the main barriers to promoting female leadership. However, it was identified that mentoring programs, support networks and inclusion policies have had a positive impact on the empowerment and promotion of women to management positions. It was concluded that, despite advances in gender equality, institutional and cultural challenges persist that limit female leadership, which highlights the need to strengthen public policies and organizational culture to foster an equitable environment in public administration.

Keywords : public administration; gender equality; leadership.

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