Empowering Women, Empowering Economy

This article is posted on The Jakarta Globe in this following link https://jakartaglobe.id/opinion/empowering-women-empowering-the-economy Perhaps nothing is more heavily regulated while on the other hand their roles are rampantly neglected compared to women in Indonesia. Living in Indonesia nowadays means everything must be measured through growth perspective while at the same time witnessing the rise of conservative colored policies. Sadly, women’s position neither good on both sides.

On the economic sector, the latest data from the central statistical agency (BPS) explains women employment rate is only 55.5 percent compared to the men at 83.18 percent. This figure has a slight improvement from the 2018 data by only increasing 0.06 percent on women while 0.17 percent on men. Compared to other emerging market neighboring countries, we are still at the behind. Thailand has 60.3 percent women employment rate and Vietnam 73.2 percent. Cambodia as the ASEAN’s second-lowest GDP country records 81.2 percent of women employment rate.

On the domestic aspects, women are highly regulated to just stay away at home while receiving a lack of legal framework protection. Such a situation is clearly reflected in the family resilience bill and the failure of issuing the sexual violence bill. However, we must move forward and seek improvement in this adverse situation. Thousands of people have joined the women march in Jakarta int he last two weeks to raise women’s voice and demands. The same spirit must be adopted by the policymakers. Not only to increase the country’s growth agenda but also to empower women’s dignity as an individual and achieve inclusive-sustainable growth.

Evidence from Women Deliver shows women’s full participation in the economic sector leads to an increase in business performance and contributes to the country’s economic development goals. Indonesian gender employment rate gap is perhaps still wide, nonetheless, the higher education sector shows the promising fact.

BPS data describes that women have been dominating the higher education rate in these past five years compared to men. This aligns with the Ministry of Higher Education data that shows there are currently more female active students by 3.4 million compared to 3.1 million male active students. The high participation on the higher education but at the same level there is wide gender employment rate gap means the women’s qualities shown by their education is not the factor that hinders them from the economic process, yet other existing cultural and structural problems, such as patriarchal mindset in society and unequal work benefits.

Creating pro-women social policies will possibly be a formal intervening action in lowering cultural and structural issues. The rejection of family resilience bills by several political parties, such as Golkar and PDIP, as well as by the president office is already a good signal. On the other side, women-concerned civil society should keep bringing women-related issues on all available discourse space.

Pro-women social policies can be translated into several forms, such as maternity leaves and progressive childcare. The current omnibus bill is highly criticized due to speculation of eliminating menstruation and maternity leaves. Since the bill is still not issued yet, there is still a room for negotiations to empower the women’s position in this gigantic pro-growth legal framework.

Example from the Scandinavian countries shows that progressive childcare policies help to improve women’s contributions in the economic sector and furthermore, reduce the gender employment rate gap within the countries. Sweden for instance, the gender employment rate gap is only 14.4 percent and the women’s average earnings as a percentage of men are around 96 percent.

A survey from the Catalyst Group explains that women in the Scandinavian countries tend to hold board positions compared to women in other European countries. This result has a positive correlation with UN Women’s findings that women’s economic equality is good for business since it improves organizational effectiveness and growth.

Empowering women through a set of social policies is not only to tackle the cultural and structural barriers, moreover, but also to avoid women to be merely captivated by the capitalist system in supporting the growth paradigm. Instead of only for improving the statistic figures, women’s contribution to the economic sector must align with the empowerment on their wider aspects of life.

Picture source: https://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Indonesia.May-Day5.2014-615x310.jpg