Brunei vs. Kenya: Where Women Fill the Middle and Men Still Own the Top
Priya MehtaSeptember 3, 2026 7 min read
🇧🇳 Brunei · 🇰🇪 Kenya
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
In Brunei, a country that regulates the import of beer to the can, nearly half of the government's permanent secretaries are women. In Kenya, a country with one of the more assertive employment-discrimination statutes in East Africa, roughly a third of working women report having been propositioned by someone with the power to promote them. Both facts are true. Neither is the whole story. If you are weighing a posting in Bandar Seri Begawan against one in Nairobi and gender is part of your calculus, the honest answer is that both governments have written impressive things into law, and both workplaces have found inventive ways around them.
Do's & Don'ts
🇧🇳 Brunei
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Dress conservatively regardless of your own gender — it reads as respect, not surrender | Assume the tudong (headscarf) is legally required of you; it isn't, for non-Muslims or, technically, for anyone |
| Address the most senior person in the room first, by title | Skip the hierarchy to get a faster answer — it is remembered longer than the answer was worth |
| Notice that women hold ministerial posts, judgeships, and roughly half of top civil-service roles | Assume that visibility at the top of government predicts anything about the oil and gas sector, still heavily male in senior ranks |
| Ask HR directly about family leave norms in your first week | Rely on written law to protect you on pay — Brunei has no statute mandating equal pay for equal work |
| Let relationships build slowly; six to twelve months is normal before real trust forms | Push for fast, informal socializing between male and female colleagues outside work — proximity itself can carry legal weight here |
| Confirm what's expected of you specifically, since rules travel by word of mouth before they hit print | Assume a rule you heard about from a colleague is either universal or optional — verify it |
🇰🇪 Kenya
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Note that women hold the majority of entry- and mid-level roles in most sectors | Assume that pipeline translates evenly into the boardroom — it thins out fast above middle management |
| Read the Employment Act before you arrive; on paper, it is genuinely protective | Assume enforcement matches the statute — reporting mechanisms are inconsistent company to company |
| Seek out the deliberate mentorship networks (Women on Boards Kenya and similar) | Expect informal "old boys' club" networking circles to open themselves to you |
| Ask direct, specific questions about promotion criteria | Accept a vague answer about "fit" or "readiness" — that vagueness is frequently where the bias lives |
| Use official HR or whistleblower channels, and put concerns in writing | Assume a single manager's goodwill is your only route to advancement — it sometimes is, and that's the problem |
| Show up in person when you can | Assume remote flexibility is a career-neutral choice — several studies point to a visibility penalty for those who take it |
Brunei: A Glass Ceiling with Excellent Furniture
Brunei's female labor force participation rate sits at 54.4%, with the female-to-male participation ratio at 76.6%, according to the [World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.NE.ZS?locations=BN). That gap is real, but it undersells what happens once women are actually inside the building. Women fill roughly 60 to 70% of middle-management positions, and by 2022 nearly half of the country's permanent secretaries and deputy permanent secretaries were women, according to the [Borneo Bulletin](https://borneobulletin.com.bn/empowering-women-bruneis-commitment-to-equity-opportunity/) — a striking figure for a country still described by outside observers as governed by a strict interpretation of Islamic law. The female share of STEM tertiary graduates reached 49% between 2014 and 2016, ahead of Singapore and the United States.
The catch is where the ceiling sits, not whether one exists. Top-line executive positions in both government and the private sector remain disproportionately male, and Brunei has no statute mandating equal pay for equal work. Hofstede Insights scores Brunei at 78 on power distance and 26 on individualism — a steeply hierarchical, group-oriented culture — which helps explain the pattern: deference to authority is total, and authority, at the very top, still tends to be male. Women advance a long way on merit and then meet a boundary that isn't written down anywhere, which makes it harder to argue with and, frustratingly, harder to prove.
Kenya: Excellent Legislation, Optional Compliance
Kenya's numbers look, at first glance, more encouraging than Brunei's. [McKinsey's 2025 Women in the Workplace research](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/women-in-the-workplace-2025-india-nigeria-and-kenya) found women hold 59% of entry-level roles and 55% of senior-leadership roles in Kenya — a far more stable pipeline than neighboring Nigeria's, where representation falls from 55% to 49% between the same two rungs. On paper, Kenya also has the stronger legal scaffolding: the Employment Act of 2007 explicitly bars gender discrimination and mandates harassment policies, and the Constitution guarantees equal protection.
The Morning Brief
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The trouble, documented at length by [UN Women's gender pay gap research](https://africa.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/un_women_kenya_gender_pay_gap_report.pdf) and by [The Standard](https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/national/article/2001526940/the-unwritten-rules-keeping-kenyan-women-from-the-top), is enforcement. Senior leadership in sectors like banking is still routinely described by the women in it as an "old boys' club," with promotions tied to informal networking spaces women are structurally excluded from. Workplace sexual harassment surveys cited by [Business Daily](https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/lifestyle/workplace/why-sexual-harassment-still-thrives-in-kenyan-workplaces-5448468) put unwanted sexual advances at 30.7% for women versus 12.3% for men, and unwelcome requests for sexual favors at 24.3% versus 6.5%. The law is unusually good. The gap between the law and the meeting room is the actual story.
The Reckoning
Put the two side by side and the counterintuitive result is this: Brunei, the country with no gender pay law and a reputation for conservative restriction, produces more women in senior civil-service roles than Kenya, the country with comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation, produces in senior private-sector leadership. Formal law turns out to be a weak predictor of where women actually end up. What predicts it better is who controls informal access — to promotion conversations, to networking rooms, to the manager's goodwill — and in both countries, despite very different legal starting points, that access still runs disproportionately through men.
The difference that actually matters for someone relocating is the shape of the risk. In Brunei, the constraint is largely structural and visible in advance: you can read the ceiling before you sign the contract, because women's advancement clusters predictably below the top rung. In Kenya, the constraint is more personal and less predictable, hinging heavily on which manager you land under and whether your company's harassment policy exists anywhere outside a PDF. One is a known quantity you can plan around. The other is a coin flip you find out about after you've already moved your furniture.
The Part the Brochure Left Out
Expat.com forum (Nairobi) — A long-time expat recounted his Kenyan girlfriend being fired for missing a single Saturday shift under an inflexible foreign boss, describing the manager flatly as "not too nice" — a small anecdote that surfaced a larger pattern posters on the thread agreed on: expat managers often import rigid expectations that land hardest on local women with the least leverage to push back.
Rest of World (Nairobi) — In a 2023 investigation into a major Nairobi call center, several women employees, identified by pseudonyms, described promotion offers made contingent on accepting a manager's advances; one said that after declining a date, her shifts were changed and her work needlessly criticized "any slight chance he got."
Adventurous Kate blog comments (Brunei) — A Bruneian-adjacent reader corrected the post's author at length, explaining that the hijab is a personal religious choice rather than a government mandate, and that visibly uncovered Bruneian women walk freely through shopping malls without incident — a reminder that outsiders often mistake local piety for state coercion.
Adventurous Kate blog comments (Brunei) — A commenter who said she'd been raised in Brunei for 18 years described how new restrictions, like an informal rule against women wearing anything above the knee, tend to spread by word of mouth after someone is caught out, rather than through any public announcement — practical advice being to over-dress until a colleague tells you otherwise.
Conclusion
If your priority is a predictable structure you can plan a career around, Brunei's ceiling is lower but it is drawn with a ruler; you will know roughly where it is before you accept the offer, and you'll have real, senior women colleagues on the way up. If your priority is a workplace where the legal system is nominally on your side and the ceiling is officially much higher, Kenya offers that — provided you land at a company that treats its own Employment Act as more than decoration, which is not guaranteed and worth investigating specifically, by name, before you sign anything.
The thing I'd actually tell a friend over a drink: ask not what the law says in either country, but who signs off on promotions, and go find someone who's done the job before you to ask how that person behaves when no one senior is watching.
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Photo by Vlada Karpovich via Pexels
Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.