“…Since a career in the civil service lasts a lifetime, the women in our sample became civil servants prior to legislation on the State Civil Apparatus (Krissetyanti, 2018), which focused on merit based, open recruitment, promotion and retirement of officials, when career advancement was arguably harder. Nonetheless, promotion mechanisms over the last decade have remained complex, and processes continue to lack fairness and suffer from charges of corruption (Ali & Kusmana, 2022; H. McLaren & Qonita, 2020; Saputra & Saputra, 2021; Widianingsih et al, 2018).…”