Closing the Corridor: Women's Advancement into Business Leadership Across the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam (2007–2023)

This study examines whether structural enablers commonly associated with women's economic empowerment — tertiary education, labor force participation, and income growth — are associated with women's advancement into business leadership across the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, the only ASEAN economies with sufficiently continuous World Development Indicators coverage of female managerial representation to support panel analysis. Using an unbalanced panel of 41 country-year observations (2007–2023) and female share of employment in senior and middle management as the leadership outcome, the study estimates a country fixed-effects model with HAC/Newey–West standard errors. None of the three structural enablers shows a statistically significant within-country association with female leadership share (all p > .50), and the within-country R² is negligible (0.019). A parallel pooled specification without country fixed effects produces a strong, statistically significant negative coefficient on female labor force participation (p < .001) — a result demonstrated to be an artifact of between-country level differences rather than a genuine relationship, since it disappears once country heterogeneity is controlled. Country-specific trend analysis shows female leadership share rising significantly in Thailand (+0.77 points/year, p < .001) and Vietnam (+0.50 points/year, p = .025), while remaining statistically flat in the Philippines. The findings suggest that macro-structural investment in women's education, employment, and income cannot be assumed to translate mechanically into greater business leadership representation, and that pooled cross-country analysis in this domain risks manufacturing spurious relationships that country-disaggregated analysis reveals to be artifacts of level differences rather than structural dynamics. The study's central contribution is thus both substantive — isolating leadership attainment as a distinct, precisely measured outcome from broader empowerment indices — and methodological — an explicit demonstration of pooling bias in comparative ASEAN gender research. Causal interpretation remains limited by the observational, three-country design.