TheJakartaPost
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Think equal, innovate for change
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Gender equality illustration (Shutterstock/File)
A
rin is a shop attendant at one of the biggest malls in Semarang. She has just moved to the city after graduating from high school and is proud to be a working woman, earning a salary to support herself and her family back in her village.
However, she is nervous about navigating a new city at night after she finishes work at 10 p.m. She feels lucky that the online ojek service (motorbike taxi) service — is affordable in Semarang and offers a safe means to go back home, but she still does not always feel secure returning home. Sometimes she gets cat-called while waiting for the ojek to arrive, or the driver asks questions that are too personal.
Her experience is not unique. Many women in Indonesia and beyond face daily risks in navigating public spaces. New technologies and digital innovation can be part of the solution, but they will not fully address women’s needs unless women are part of designing these solutions and their considerations are taken into account. Women have tremendous potential to transform our societies, but unfortunately inequality and violence against women remains among the biggest challenges in realizing this potential.
Every year on March 8 we celebrate International Women’s Day. This year’s theme focuses on innovative ways to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women, particularly by functioning social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure. Making the gender equal world envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires innovation in policy-making and implementation to remove the barriers for those who are left farthest behind and those most marginalized.
In Indonesia, women’s participation in the labor force is still low (only around 50 percent) compared to men (approximately 80 percent). Women are more often in informal employment, which limits their access to social protection and their productivity and income security could increase if this were changed.
In 2016, the Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry commissioned a violence against women survey which was carried out by the Statistics Indonesia and supported by the United Nations. It showed that one in three Indonesian women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime, regardless of age, education, income and social status.
Violence against women does not just happen in private areas, but also in public spaces. A Safety Audit Scoping study conducted in Jakarta in 2017 found that infrastructure and unsafe public transportation were amongst the most common places where harassment and violence against women and girls occured.
