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We need more than ‘gender-responsive budgeting’
To achieve equality, what’s also important is using the budget for intervention and programs to overcome barriers to women’s pursuit of their wellbeing.
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Women tend to have fewer choices than men on what they want to do with their lives. (JP/Budhi Button)
I
nequality of opportunity between the genders is shrinking but at a laborious pace. With a 32 percent average gender gap among 149 countries, the World Economic Forum in 2018 forecast that women will have to wait 108 more years to no longer feel disadvantaged — a time frame no one can afford.
Having realized the hazards of gender inequality in Indonesia’s development progress, such as a high dependency rate, low income per capita and lower productivity, the government has adopted “gender-responsive budgeting”.
Through the state budget, billions of rupiah have been allocated for different forms of social assistance aiming to improve the lives of women. Millions of jobs are created and the number of unemployed Indonesians continues to decline: from 6.87 million in February 2018 to 6.82 million in February 2019.
There is only one thing that Indonesia does better than the rich Western countries in this regard; and it is on “wage equality” between men and women, ranked 32 out of 149 countries according to the 2018 Gender Gap Index of the WEF. However, the index still shows women’s low achievement compared to men such as in educational attainment, health, economic participation and opportunity.
The national sex-disaggregated data also confirms these slow changes, with women’s participation in the workforce climbing from 55.44 percent in February 2018 to only 55.5 percent in February 2019, most of which is in low-paying, low-status and low-security jobs. Meanwhile, the participation rate of men was 83 percent in February 2018 and 83.18 percent in February 2019 according to Statistics Indonesia (BPS).
Incorporating gender issues when setting budgets is certainly a good start, as Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, remarked.
But budgeting is only the first push to make development equal. What comes after is contingent on how the government conducts its responsibilities.
