Personal is political, it’s now or never for the government to have the political will to address on the dilemmas that our Malaysian women face everyday.

Media Statement by Wong Shu Qi, Senai State Assemblyperson and Assistant Publicity Secretary of DAP Wanita on 31^st October 2013 (Thursday) in Kuala Lumpur:

Personal is political, it’s now or never for the government to have the political will to address on the dilemmas that our Malaysian women face everyday.

This is the eighth year since the World Economic Forum initiated “The Global Gender Gap Report”. It was first launched in 2006. It is regrettable that instead of moving upwards in the ranking, Malaysia has remained stagnant in terms of scores while the changes in the ranking are mainly due to the increase of participating countries in the past 8 years.

We are ranked at 102nd place out of 136 countries with a score of 0.652 (1:00 is equality, 0.00 is inequality) in the Global Gender Gap Report 2013. The scores decreased by 0.002 due to the sub-index of economic participation as it decreased by 0.009 to 0.590.

The four criteria used for evaluate the gender gap are as follows: economic participation and opportunity, education attainment, health and survival and political empowerment.

The table below depicts the ‘stagnation’ of the Malaysian scenario :

There is one bright spot: Malaysian has been successful in closing the gender gap in educational achievement, as there are now more female than male students undergoing tertiary education.

In spite of that though, it is puzzling to see that the female economic participation rate is considerably low compared with the educational achievement record of our female students. Somehow, our highly-educated female population does not appear to be well-represented in the workforce.

It’s a well-acknowledged fact that there is a strong correlation between gender gap and national competitiveness, income and development. Yet, the participation rate of Malaysian women in the workforce has remained pretty much stagnant for the last 30 years while our neighbouring countries are not only leading the way in the region but also becoming role models globally.

We have a 46% female population participation rate in the labour force while the male participation rate is at 79%. This means that there is at least 25% of our educated population still untapped in developing our national economy.

Women form half of Malaysia’s population as well as the world’s, and it is obvious we cannot move forward without their participation. Malaysia has been stuck in the middle-income trap for more than 20 years. It is not an exaggeration when we say that it’s a now-or-never battle.

How many years have we wasted in our failure to close the gender gap and how many more years will we need in our bid to achieve greater national competitiveness and higher-income society?

We hereby urge the federal government to show serious commitment in improving female participation in the workforce, by drawing up more family-oriented or women-friendly policy framework, and implementing them without further delay.

The goal of the policy framework should be to ensure that both father and mother can share responsibilities equally and reduce the burden of working mothers. Apart from still being perceived as the main caretakers of young children, they also need to compete with men and the playing field is far from level at this point in time.

The personal is political. It’s now or never — the government must have the political will to address the dilemmas faced by Malaysian women everyday. Good-quality, incentivised and reasonably-priced — better yet, subsidized — childcare centres to encourage our highly educated women to remain in the workforce must be set up, or else, another decade will be wasted in closing the gender gap.

Wong Shu Qi