Gender ideologies, representation and contestation

The reformasi era of the past twenty years has ushered in many changes that have simultaneously progressed and challenged gender equality. At the end of the Suharto era, gender equality was a major political demand that underpinned democratic reform. Many legislative changes were made, and with these changes the dismantling of the ‘gender order’ that the New Order established began to be disrupted. However, with every legislative change came also contrary moves that sought to challenge progress towards gender equality. The political ideology of the New Order seems difficult to dismantle completely and has found new expressions and contestations.

The ‘gender order’ that underpinned the political ideology of Suharto’s New Order had heteronormative, binary and static understandings at its core. This period saw ‘male’ and ‘female’ defined more clearly according to a specific set of appearances, social roles and spatial distinctions that privileged the family or kekeluargaan as the foundation on which development—pembangunan—took place. Motherhood for example, was the basis of citizenship for women and assumed subordinate to men in what Julia Suryakusuma (2011) termed ‘state ibuism’. Repressive and restrictive representations of women and circumscribed female roles in public life underpinned the political system. Its binary counterpart, bapakism, heralded the construction of fathers of the nation, as well as the household. These binary constructs were underpinned by kodrat (biologically specific nature), assumed to be God-given and sanctioned by Islam.

Kathryn Robinson (2008, and this volume) developed an approach that identified ways in which this gender order mapped on to specific areas of power during the New Order. Drawing on social theory of gender from R.W. Connell, Robinson’s analysis reflected that ‘gender relations are present in all types of institutions. They may not be the most important structure in a particular case, but they are certainly a major structure of most’ (Connell 1987: 120). Gender relations can be understood as foci for the exercise of social, political and economic power in society; as a multidimensional structure operating in a complex network of institutions. As Kathy Robinson updates in her contribution to this volume, these institutions include, for example, marriage, political representation, laws on domestic violence and sexual violence, and employment settings. Changes to these institutions and processes over the past twenty years have provided room for gender equality gains to be made.

The advancement of gender equality is a long-term social change and can be reflected in measurable economic indicators. In the Western world, the improvement of women’s status and freedom in society is accompanied by dramatic changes in economic indicators, including an increase in female labour market participation, an increase in female educational attainment, narrowing of the gender wage gap, an increase in age at first marriage, and a decline in fertility rate (Goldin 2006). Similar changes have occurred in the developing world in the past few decades where there was relatively fast economic growth. Education of girls caught up with that of boys by the mid-2010s; labour force participation of women has increased significantly, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the fertility rate has dramatically declined (World Bank 2012). However, there are still persistent large gender gaps in earnings, health and asset ownership (ibid.).

The trajectory of economic gender equality in Indonesia has been consistent with that of the developing world in many aspects. Since independence, Indonesia has made great progress in increasing schooling, reducing the fertility rate and increasing life expectancy of women. Economic liberalisation in the New Order era created fast economic growth and job opportunities for women, especially in export-oriented manufacturing. The end of the New Order, however, has seen a dramatic decline in the importance of export-oriented manufacturing as a growth engine. The new driver of economic growth has mainly been the resources boom. At the same time, the change from an authoritarian and highly centralised regime to a much more democratic and decentralised regime has allowed different social and religious groups and ideologies, including gender ideologies, to surface.

Against this backdrop, how has gender equality evolved from an economic perspective during the post-Suharto era? In this chapter we will use large-scale economic data to construct trends of many of the economic indicators of gender equality. We mainly use a cohort analysis approach to show long-term generational change. We find that employment opportunities for women have significantly improved during the post- Suharto era. Each new cohort of women is more likely to join the labour force, more likely to be employed in the formal sector, and more likely to be managers and professionals in the years following completion of their education. Educational attainment of women has also caught up and surpassed that of men in recent years.