On 26 October 2014, Indonesia achieved a milestone with the appointment of a record 8 women ministers to President Joko Widowi’s 34-person Cabinet, including the first female foreign affairs minister.
These historic appointments are part of a rising trend in women’s political representation in Indonesia’s maturing democracy. In the 2014 Indonesian elections, the number of women candidates was a commendable 37% (2,467 of 6,619 candidates) which had increased from 30% in 2009. In the 2009 elections, women held 18.2% or 108 seats in Indonesia’s Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, an increase from 11 percent in 2004.
In contrast, Malaysia is far behind at both the Executive and Legislative level. Out of Malaysia’s current Cabinet of 35 ministers, only 2 of them are women. In the 2013 Parliamentary elections, only 10.7% or 56 out of 523 candidates from all parties were women. At present, women now hold only 10.4% or 23 seats in Parliament, which is a percentage that has failed to improve since 1999.
To add insult to injury, Malaysia’s ranking in the recently released World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2014 confirms our worsening international record. The Political Empowerment Index takes into consideration the numbers of women in Parliament, women in Ministerial positions and years with a female head of state. Malaysia’s Index ranking is an embarrassing 132 out of 142 countries, second worst in ASEAN before Brunei which ranks 142 and does not even hold elections. Indonesia is far ahead of us at 86 out of 142[1].
Why has Indonesia overtaken us so drastically? Why is women’s political representation in Indonesia on the increase while in Malaysia it has remained stagnant? The answers lie in Indonesia’s electoral reforms made since its democratization in 1999 – especially the 30% women’s quota and its proportional representation system.
The 30% women’s quota was first introduced through Article 65(1) of the Electoral Law 12/2003, which said that each political party participating in the election should ‘bear in its heart’ the desirability of a minimum of 30 percent of women in each region for the national, provincial and district-level legislators in their lists of electoral candidates. Although this was a non-compulsory quota, this was later amended by Article 55 of the Electoral Law 10/2008 which stipulated that at least one in every three candidates on a political party’s list must be a woman.
In recent times, political parties whose candidate lists did not fulfil this quota have been barred from competing in that particular electoral district. Earlier in 2014, the General Election Commission (Komisi Pemilihan Umum or KPU) actually disqualified 77 candidates from five parties in seven electoral districts because they did not meet the 30 percent threshold. Because of the KPU’s strong enforcement, the 30 percent quota was upheld in nearly all electoral districts across Indonesia.[2]
Indonesia also has a proportional representation electoral system, which improves the chances of women and minority candidates and gives smaller parties a fair shot at obtaining a seat. The effectiveness of proportional representation is backed by research from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which found that internationally this system delivered a much higher percentage of women MPs (25%) in 2012 than first-past-the-post which is practiced by Malaysia (14%) or a mixture of these two systems (17.5%).[3]
If we in Malaysia wish to catch up with Indonesia and other maturing democracies, we should commit to increasing women’s political representation through concrete actions.
I call on the Barisan Nasional Government to table amendments to the Elections Act adopting a 30% women candidate quota for all political parties contesting in future elections at the Parliament and State Assembly level, as in the case of Indonesia. The Election Commission must also seriously consider reforming our existing first-past-the-post-system to a proportional representation system.