The current draft of the so-called family resilience bill has riled many Indonesians. The purpose of the bill demands more explanation to unpick how it can truly make families stronger and more resilient.

It contradicts the spirit of previous laws that had endeavored to promote gender equality and protections for women and children.

Examples are Law No. 23/2004 on the elimination of domestic violence, the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women through Law No. 7/1984, and most recently, the revision of the 1974 Marriage Law to increase the legal marriage age to 19 for both genders, which was earlier 16 for females and 19 for males.

Apart from the growing yet familiar arguments about how the draft bill puts women at a disadvantaged position, the impact of having this draft bill pass goes far beyond the domestic and gender spheres.

A number of development economists have highlighted a positive correlation between gender equality and the long-term economic growth of a country. Countries with greater female autonomy allow women to contribute more to human capital and prosperity, leading to greater economic development in the long run. The contrasting gap of women’s participation in the labor force between Scandinavian countries and countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, is a factor in why they have big gaps in gross domestic product and economic development.

Women’s empowerment is one of the most important sociopolitical factors contributing to the development of the Global South, and Indonesia is no exception. Amartya Sen in 1990 estimated a large number of “missing women” resulted in skewed sex ratios, and argued that this has been one of history’s crucial developmental hurdles.

In 2005, then-United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan stated that gender equality is a prerequisite for eliminating poverty, reducing infant mortality and reaching universal education.

Among many studies, in 2015 an article in the Journal of International Women’s Studies by Fatemeh Torabi and M. Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi also showed a positive association between women’s participation and economic growth, and how investment in women’s human capital can accelerate the pace of development in the Middle East and North Africa region. Educated women are more likely to have better jobs and higher incomes and the ability to contribute financially to the family’s living costs and raise their children better. Therefore, investing in female capital is an inseparable part of investing in human capital as a whole, to ensure the betterment of human resources and the next generation of a country.

In Indonesia, women have been playing crucial roles in the country’s economic growth. From street vendors to executive officers to ministers, Indonesian women have been shaping our public and economic policies. Indonesia now ranks considerably high in the UN’s human development index where gender development and equality is an important element. The 2018 index released late last year revealed Indonesia ranked 111 out of 189 countries with a value of 0.707 in 2018, the first time it ranked in the “high human development” category.

As more and more Indonesian women become educated, join the workforce and take on active roles in political and social life outside child-rearing, they continue to become a vital force for the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. It explains why this family resilience draft bill has caused such resistance through its campaign to put restrictions on what women and men should and should not do, and could harm its reputation as a country where Islam and democracy can work hand in hand. For example, Article 25 of the draft family resilience bill on the housewife’s role in a household is seen as a private intrusion and a campaign for women’s re-domestication, essentially aiming to strip women’s rights to undertake activities outside the household and for their own personal development.

Moreover, Indonesians have begun to show shifting social norms with regard to how men and women perceive equality in the workplace, parental leave and roles in the household, as presented by a recent finding conducted by Investing in Women, an initiative of the Australian government. The key finding showed positively shifting social norms with regard to how men and women perceive equality in the workplace, parental leave and roles in the household.

Respectively, more than 85 percent of the male and female respondents agreed that they had the same chance for promotion, up to 80 percent men and women disagreed that men should be criticized for taking paternity leave, and almost half of male respondents said that they shared household work equally with their partners.

This shows that what the public needs from the government is an enabling environment that promotes equality more between men and women’s modern roles in both the public and private job spheres. For example, the government can set up workplace policies and practices to prevent harassment and support women and men who get harassed in the workplace; building positive attitudes in the workplace for those taking parental leave; amplifying stories of men embracing their roles as fathers, care givers and equal partners in household duties, as well as stories of women’s roles in business and economic development.

These kind of policies, I believe, would gain greater acceptance than a vague, controversial draft family resilience bill that tries to intrude into Indonesians’ private lives.

It is for this reason that if this bill is passed, it would be a backward step and have a detrimental effect on Indonesia’s economic growth and, therefore, it must not be passed.

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Staff in a foreign embassy in Jakarta. The views expressed are her own.

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