Since 2004, Indonesia has conducted more than 490 elections for heads of local government at both the provincial and district levels. Although the introduction of direct elections for local government heads (pemilihan kepala daerah, or pilkada) has created opportunities for women to run as candidates, their level of participation has been extremely low. By the end of 2009 only nine women had been elected head of a regional government in direct elections: seven as district head (bupati); one as mayor (walikota) of an urban municipality; and one as the governor of a province. Indonesia also had one female deputy governor and 14 women serving as deputy mayors or deputy district heads. These very low numbers are far from ideal for a country that says it is serious about promoting gender equality in political life.

There have been some genuine efforts to increase women' political participation in Indonesia since the beginning of the democratic transition in 1998. At the national level, these have included the introduction of a 30 per cent quota for female legislative candidates in 2004 and the adoption of a ‘zipper’ system for candidacy lists in 2009. Under the zipper system, political parties had to include at least one woman among the three candidates they placed at the top of their lists, thus giving women candidates a real chance of being elected. These efforts have produced a slight improvement in women' representation in the national legislature, the People' Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR). In elections for local government heads, however, even weak affirmative action measures have been conspicuously absent, and there has been no serious policy consideration of how to reduce the gender gap in local government leadership positions.

In this chapter I examine the factors confronting women who want to be nominated as candidates in local executive elections. Beyond the absence of positive discrimination measures, one key challenge for women is that they still have difficulty convincing party leaders and other political elites of their electability. Women also tend to lack the financial resources and political networks necessary to achieve political success in regional Indonesia. While local political and religious leaders are often hostile towards women candidates, there are indications that voters will support capable women candidates if given the opportunity.