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View all search resultsMaintaining progress on gender equality is key to Indonesia’s pandemic recovery
If policymakers make decisions now, in 2020 and beyond, that boost gender equality by 2030, it could add $13 trillion to global GDP.
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ndonesia’s economy has been hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts that the economy could shrink between 2.8 percent and 3.9 percent in 2020, while Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry expects 5.5 million people will lose their jobs.
The key challenge for policymakers will be how to get people back to work and resume economic growth. Maintaining the country’s progress on gender equality will be key to addressing the impact of COVID-19 and driving the recovery.
Even before COVID-19, global progress towards gender parity had been uneven. According to the McKinsey Global Institute’s Power of Parity research that mapped 15 gender indicators across 95 countries, in many places, progress had stagnated or reversed over recent years.
Indonesia had bucked that trend. The country was successfully bringing more women into work, by far the biggest contributor to gender equality. Women make up around 39 percent of Indonesia’s workforce, an increase from 2014 to 2019 and slightly above the average of 38 percent for the 95 countries tracked. According to World Bank data, in 2019, 41 percent of those jobs were formal salaried jobs, up from 28 percent in 2000 – a sign that the quality of women’s jobs was improving.
Major challenges remained, but Indonesia’s progress was tangible. In less than a decade, Indonesia has also doubled girls’ enrolment in secondary schools, made rapid progress in reducing maternal mortality, and set a 30 percent quota for female candidates for government, which has helped Indonesia to be of the best performers in Asia Pacific on the representation of women in politics.
Now, COVID-19 and its economic fallout risks reversing these hard-won gains. While most people’s lives have been negatively affected by the crisis, our analysis shows that, overall, women’s jobs and livelihoods have proved more vulnerable to the pandemic. We found that globally women account for 54 percent of overall job losses despite comprising 39 percent of the global workforce. Put another way, a woman in work is nearly twice as likely to lose job than a man.
There are several reasons, in addition to existing gender inequalities, for this disproportionate economic impact on women. Women already do an average of 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care work. The pandemic has significantly increased the burden of unpaid work, and women have borne the brunt of that increase.
