Taboka Bathoeng*

The women who guard the door to leadership are often portrayed as gatekeepers, standing on platforms built by patriarchy.

They are accused of pulling up the ladder, of distancing themselves from those below. But this narrative misses the deeper truth: the problem is not the women—it is the scaffold itself.

When the goal is to smash the glass ceiling, the task is not to blame survivors who have endured the climb, but to restructure the system so that women can ascend together, without harm.

The so-called “queen bee phenomenon,” where women leaders appear to distance themselves from junior women, is less about individual betrayal than about survival in a hostile architecture of power (Derks, Van Laar & Ellemers, 2016).

Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s classic study Men and Women of the Corporation showed decades ago that tokenism forces women into defensive postures, shaping behaviour in ways that reinforce exclusion rather than solidarity.

More recent data from UN Women (2023, 2024) and the World Bank (2024) confirm that progress remains uneven: women are still underrepresented in leadership, politics, and corporate boardrooms, despite global commitments to equality.

The challenge, then, is structural. Patriarchal scaffolding rewards competition over collaboration, forcing women to prove themselves in ways that often isolate them from peers.

Chandra Mohanty (1988) warned against Western feminist discourses that universalise women’s struggles without accounting for context. In Botswana and across the Global South, the scaffolding is not only patriarchal but also shaped by colonial legacies, economic inequities, and cultural expectations.

To move forward, we must rethink leadership pathways. It is not enough to count women in positions of power; as Yoder (1991) argued, numbers alone do not dismantle tokenism.

What matters is whether the scaffolding itself is rebuilt—whether institutions create ladders that women can climb together, without being punished for solidarity.

This is not a call for pity, nor for blame. It is a call for redesign. If we want more women at the top, we must stop asking them to survive the climb alone.

We must build structures that allow them to rise together, reshaping the platforms so that leadership is not a lonely perch but a collective ascent.

• Taboka Bathoeng is Women’s Commissioner for Botswana (AUSP, 2025–2026) | Gender Equality Advocate