Women in Leadership: Pulling Each Other Up, CSS 2020 Answer

Exam question: CSS 2020: Women need to be in leadership positions to pull more women into leadership roles. Is this suggestion that women need to “pull each other up” a useful one, or is it inappropriate preferential treatment?

Syllabus area: Section VII: Gender and Governance of CSS Gender Studies.

Short answer

Outline for quick revision

Introduction: the question behind the question
The case that “pulling each other up” is useful and necessary
The objection: is it preferential treatment?, answered
The honest caveat: when the mechanism fails
The defended view
Conclusion

1. Introduction: the Question Behind the Question

The suggestion that women must “pull each other up” into leadership rests on one empirical claim and faces one moral objection. The claim is that leadership reproduces itself, leaders promote people who resemble the leaders, so a leadership that is male keeps producing male leaders unless the cycle is deliberately broken. The objection is that deliberate breaking is “preferential treatment.” This answer defends the suggestion, and its central move is an inversion: the preferential treatment already exists, has always existed, and is male, women pulling each other up is not the introduction of preference into a neutral system but the correction of a system that was never neutral.

2. The Case That “Pulling Each Other Up” Is Useful and Necessary

(a) The numbers prove the cycle

Women hold only about 6 percent of managerial positions in Pakistan, and at the 2025 measurement the share of women in ministerial positions stood at zero, an all-male cabinet governing a 48.8-percent-female population.
Leadership this exclusively male did not happen by merit alone; it happened by reproduction, the glass ceiling, the invisible barriers that cannot be seen but reliably block women’s rise.

(b) The role-model mechanism

Leadership is learned by sight: a girl who has never seen a woman judge does not apply to the bench, which is why the discipline’s remedy for the psyche, making women’s strength visible so the next generation’s mind records a different image of woman, applies to careers exactly.
Every woman leader is therefore two appointments at once: one position filled, and one possibility opened for every woman watching.

(c) The pipeline mechanism

A woman in the deciding room changes what the room decides: women leaders sponsor, mentor and promote the women whom male networks overlook, and the legislative record proves the pattern at national scale, because the women-friendly statutes of the 2010s were moved by the women whom the quota had seated.
the sisterhood principle names the mechanism, “sisterhood is powerful”, solidarity among women converting individual success into collective advance.

3. The Objection: Is It Preferential Treatment?, Answered

The inversion is the answer: men have pulled each other up throughout history, the old-boys’ network, the ticket awarded in male drawing rooms, the promotion decided over interactions women are excluded from, which is the Male Peer Support structure operating in career form; nobody called it preferential treatment because it was called “normal.”
The equity definition dissolves the objection, the line: equity is a deliberate step favouring one gender so both benefit. Equality gives the same to all from an unequal starting line; equity corrects the line, and women pulling each other up is equity performed person-to-person.
The correction is temporary by design: like the quota, the mechanism is scaffolding, needed exactly until the contest itself produces parity, at which point it retires; a corrective with an expiry date is not a privilege.
The merit objection collapses on inspection: a system that produced 94 percent male management was not selecting on pure merit to begin with, one cannot defend as “merit” an outcome that statistically excludes half the talent pool.

4. The Honest Caveat: When the Mechanism Fails

The critical evaluation requires the caveat: internalized patriarchy operates in women too, the discipline records women who, having risen, police other women rather than pull them (the mother-in-law pattern transported to the office), because the psyche does not check the sex of its host.
The caveat refines rather than refutes: the suggestion is that women need to pull each other up, a norm to be built, precisely because it does not happen automatically.

5. The Defended View

The suggestion is useful, necessary and not preferential, for three defended reasons: it corrects a pre-existing male preference system rather than introducing preference; it operates through equity, the deliberate step from which both genders benefit; and it is self-retiring, needed only until leadership stops reproducing itself in one sex.
In one line: women pulling each other up is not favouritism entering the system, it is the first fairness the system has seen.

6. Conclusion

Whether women “pulling each other up” is useful or preferential depends entirely on whether the ladder was neutral before women reached it, and every number in this answer says it was not: six percent of management, zero percent of the cabinet, an invisible ceiling over half the population. Men have pulled each other up since leadership existed, unremarked because unnamed. The suggestion before us merely asks women to do, visibly and deliberately, what the structure has always done invisibly for men, and to keep doing it only until the day the contest no longer needs the correction. That is not inappropriate preferential treatment. That is the repayment, at last, of a preference the system has been extending in one direction all along.

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Last updated: 2 November 2026.

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