Gender in Global Agreements and National Arguments: The Indonesian Experience

As the largest Muslim majority nation and third largest democracy in the world, Indonesia has a remarkable history of activism by women. In earlier times, anti-colonial resistance movements included a number of prominent women leaders. Indonesia is the home of Kartini, a renowned international feminist, Megawati Sukarnoputri who was its first woman president, and Puan Maharani as the first female speaker of parliament. Moreover, the administration of President Joko Widodo contains the largest number of female ministers holding strategic positions in Indonesian history. The ministry handling women’s affairs has gone through a breakthrough when it was named Ministry of Women’s Empowerment with Khofifah Indar Parawansa as its Minister.

As a UN member country, Indonesia has ratified all major gender-related treaties, particularly the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and has publicly accepted the responsibility to put gender equality principles into national law and consistent practice.

This thesis concentrates on the challenges of implementing gender-related treaties in Indonesia and seeks to discover why gender inequality remains prevalent despite the existing agreed and ratified covenants. Notwithstanding some notable achievements, real life is not always fair to Indonesian women. Indonesia’s maternal morbidity and mortality rates remain high, violence against women is common in both public and private spheres, access to reproductive health services is still limited, and women are underrepresented in key areas of political and public life. Moreover, discriminatory and gender-biased laws undermine women’s livelihoods.

The attempt to analyse these contradictions focuses on international scholarly literature supplemented by primary research interviews undertaken in Indonesia. It aims to examine the ratification and adaptation process of treaties related to gender in Indonesia, to assess the approaches of the government and non-governmental sectors in implementing laws and regulations to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, and to identify the obstacles and challenges to realising those goals.
The interviews with government officials, representatives of international organisations, NGO staff, gender experts as well as religious and community leaders, suggest that Indonesia’s ratification of gender-related treaties is simply a political action aimed at maintaining the nation’s international reputation. Implementation is another story. Policy ratification doesn’t translate into program implementation. Moreover, critical barriers to gender equality and women’s empowerment arise from deep and strongly defended cultural stereotypes differentiating women and men. Cultural and traditional values as well as religious beliefs too often serve to entrench patriarchy.

Indonesia has consistently failed to fulfil the expectations and obligations of the treaties in its domestic legal development due to the strength of patriarchy and the weakness of all reform efforts. Politicians have failed to implement the gender laws they have enacted. Instead they lean on existing social, cultural, and religious justifications to lock women into disadvantageous situations.

Unlike other failures in policy implementation in the Indonesian government, efforts to realise gender equity are given less attention compared to other national efforts such as combatting corruption and improving infrastructure. There is no way to progress other than to unite and to continue efforts to eliminate gender inequality and discrimination through true implementation of gender-related treaties. The national government has a key role in rejecting the structure of patriarchy by strengthening oversight and monitoring of national legal instruments. This requires enormous change at all levels of the state system and cultural structure where gender inequality is entrenched.