Women’s Representation in Leadership Positions in Ethiopia: Analysis of Gender Equality in Higher Leadership Positions from 1991 – 2022
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Date
2025-06-01
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Addis Abeba Universty
Abstract
Women's inclusion in higher leadership positions guarantees diverse perspectives and promotes gender equality, resulting in better decision-making, organizational performance and accelerating social change toward a more inclusive society. The primary goal of this PhD dissertation is to examine women's representation journey in higher leadership positions in Ethiopia over the last three decades. Within the broad scope of this research, the study addressed four specific objectives. The study has been led by a pragmatic philosophical paradigm to frame the research strategies and come up with workable remedies. Additionally, feminist and transformative theories were utilized as a foundational framework to inform the research objectives or overall investigation. Although this dissertation is more inclined towards qualitative research features, it has employed a mixed-methods approach considering the research subject required both qualitative and quantitative research data types and designs. The study utilized descriptive, explanatory, and phenomenological research designs based on the nature of the research questions. Meanwhile, data-gathering methods such as in-depth interviews, key informant interviews, and document analysis have been used to address the research objectives. The study's key informants and participants were chosen using the purposive sampling technique. This study produced a wide range of findings by employing all appropriate scientific procedures. Hence, according to the study's findings, women in Ethiopia have been underrepresented in higher-level leadership and decision-making positions over the past 30 years. Additionally, according to the findings of this study, Ethiopia's women-based policy frameworks are admirable, but an evaluation based on three key metrics reveals their insufficiency in terms of content-wise comprehensiveness, which has an impact on the promotion of women to leadership roles. The result of this study further identified socio-cultural, workplace, institutional, and women's personal challenges as the significant barriers to women in their efforts to advance to higher leadership positions. Finally, this study provided the lived experiences of five renowned Ethiopian women leaders and their lived experiences demonstrated that, although women face multifaceted impediments in their professional and family-related lives, they can overcome these obstacles through determination, consistency to their goals, continuous personal development, resilience, and hard work to achieve aspirations to ascend into higher leadership positions. To summarize, while women's existing representation in Ethiopia's higher leadership roles is admirable and encouraging, gender equality has yet to be attained. To achieve gender parity in this regard, the efforts of different stakeholders, including the government, women themselves, civil society organizations (CSOs), social institutions, and society in general, are fundamental. Furthermore, existing policies, strategies, and plans for women need to be revisited in order to improve women's representation in higher-level decision-making roles. In this regard, to bring practical solutions, subsequent future studies should be conducted by refining the theoretical, methodological, and conceptual scopes of this study, using this study as a springboard.
Key words: Women, Leadership, Women empowerment, Higher leadership positions, women’s representation, Gender equality, Ethiopia
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Keywords
Women, Leadership, Women empowerment, Higher leadership positions, women’s representation, Gender equality, Ethiopia