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Indonesia’s women deserve to be celebrated
Modeling from the ILO shows that government-supported universal childcare and long-term care services could generate almost 10.4 million jobs.
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Learning time: Kids participate in a preschool activity. Expense and the lack of access to daycare centers are blamed for the low participation of women in the labor force. (Shutterstock/anek.soowannaphoom)
T
oday, women and men, girls and boys celebrate Hari Ibu, or Women’s Day. For many, this celebration could entail dressing up in traditional clothes for school, organizing a small party or bazaar or offering a quiet prayer.
However, do we still commemorate Hari Ibu to acknowledge and appreciate the sacrifices and progress made by Indonesian women? Do we still celebrate it as an annual reminder of the struggle for women’s rights?
As a husband and father, I look forward to celebrating this day with my wife and our children. Yet, at the same time, I know that to realize the vision of women’s rights and civic engagement in Indonesia that was conveyed at the first Women’s Congress in Yogyakarta in 1928, as well as the political and economic participation envisioned by our founding parents, within my children’s lifetime, Indonesian women need and deserve more than just remembrance and appreciation on this day.
Women need and deserve more help. Help with cleaning, help with cooking, help with looking after children and aging parents. All these unpaid domestic chores are what impede them from achieving the very rights and progress that we celebrate today. In fact, these acts of love and duty, which are synonymous with being a good wife and mother, demand an exhausting 8.1 hours per day and for most need to be squeezed in alongside paid work. In comparison, Indonesian men spend on average just 2.9 hours per day on care work according to a 2023 study by Prospera and Investing in Women.
As the husband of a successful working woman, I’ve seen first-hand how these weighty family and care responsibilities can directly shape women’s career aspirations and employment choices.
A couple of months after my first child was born, my wife left her full-time job for a part-time contract job with more flexible working hours. This move gave her more time to spend with family but came at the price of her career development and job security. As an economist and an observant husband, I was not surprised to read that marriage and having children are reliable predictors of when an Indonesian woman will exit the labor force.
Almost 40 percent of Indonesian women leave the labor force after marriage and childbirth and women explicitly attribute this change to the care responsibilities associated with being a wife and mother, according to a 2023 study by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.
