OpinionExpress.com, Aug 2018 in Wikimedia Commons
There was once a time in Asia, within living memory, when the birth of a daughter was seen as a setback to the family. The father likely thought so; the mother, ironically, would have agreed. Even now, paternalistic ideas belittling women in Asia remain more than a nuisance. In China and Japan, women who remain unmarried after 25, however highly educated and professionally accomplished they may be, are dismissed as ‘Christmas cakes’, whose worth diminishes precipitously henceforth. As a result of this anti-woman bias, these families’ sons and grandsons whose births were so cherished, must struggle to find women to marry. In China and India today, men outnumber women by 70 million.
Even in Southeast Asia, where women have historically enjoyed a more equal position in society, misogynist policies go unchallenged because of an unspoken but widespread conservative mindset. In Thailand, women can no longer join the police force as its academy reversed a policy of enrolling women cadets, which had been in place since 2009. In Indonesia, female applicants seeking to join the military and the police force have had to undergo the ‘two-finger virginity test’ for decades. While human rights groups have denounced these policies and demanded their repeal, most Thais and Indonesians simply look the other way.
Unsurprisingly, these toxic norms hold women back in Asia, as our first Spotlight article by Plan International CEO Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, contends. Societies in Asia are choosing to face serious challenges posed by quick-moving developments like automation and artificial intelligence with one hand tied as they continue to ignore what half of their population can bring to the table. Gaps between men and women manifest themselves perniciously since childhood in unequal access to, say, quality education and use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Years after, the result will show up in the form of under-representation within growing and high-value sectors of the digital economy.
Women’s under-representation in Asia is even worse in the public sector. According to UN Women, which advocates gender equality and female empowerment, only 22.8 percent of all national parliamentarians are women and they are twice as likely to hold a social rather than an economic portfolio. There is no question, the fight to eliminate gender disparity must continue in both the public and private sectors. Our second op-ed article provides suggestions on what women and men should focus on in the office, not just for their sakes but also for the sake of their children and grandchildren.
