Women’s share in public participation in the past two decades indicates promising progress. More and more women in Indonesia have been appointed as members of national parliament (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), cabinet ministers and ambassadors. Such progress is indicated in the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Inequality Index, which shows a decline from 0.571 in 1995 to 0.444 in 2021 (UNDP 2020). The political domain shows more progress than the two other measures. While the gender gap in politics declined by 12 points between 1995 and 2021, the gender gap in education declined by only 2 points, and labour force participation by 4.7 points. The progress in women’s public participation follows a series of affirmative policies and is strongly in line with the global trend.

However, it is important to note that progress towards closing the gender gap in Indonesia is still low on a global scale. Women’s underrepresentation in politics, among other professions, continues to be a persistent issue in Indonesia. Despite women comprising half the national population and the granting of suffrage in 1945, their share in politics remains insignificant.

The world average gender gap in parliamentary representation has decreased by 26.2 points in the past 27 years, while the gaps in secondary education and labour force participation have decreased by 3.8 and 1.3 points respectively (UNDP 2020). Indonesia’s performance in the Gender Inequality Index has also been the lowest among other Southeast Asian countries, with a value of 0.48, ranking it 121 out of 162 countries in 2019 (ibid.). It can be argued that Indonesia has been doing well in terms of reducing gender disparity in the economic sector. Yet it continues to struggle in pursuing gender parity in politics and in education.

In another measure of the gender gap, under the political empowerment spectrum published by the World Economic Forum (2022), the percentage of women in parliament and ministerial positions in Indonesia ranked 88th. As shown in Figure 5.1, political empowerment is the weakest performing measure as it scores lower than the world average. Indonesia once sat at 41st place for this indicator when it had a female head of state—President Megawati Sukarnoputri—in 2001–2004. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that Indonesia’s overall rank is 10th in East Asia and the Pacific Region, better than China, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Japan.