Between Piety and Precarity: Women’s movements, care work and labour force stagnation in Indonesia

During this Research in Progress seminar, researchers Tutik Rachmawati & Yohanes Andika Tjitrajaya will present their research which aims to answer these questions.

They show that despite substantial improvements in women's education and health, their participation in the work force has remained at 46-54 percent over the past 30 years.

Drawing on historical, institutional and political economy perspectives, they argue that women’s labour force participation is influenced by religiously-informed gender norms, state-crafted femininity, partial legal reforms and an underdeveloped care economy.

Their analysis traces how early women’s movements linked emancipation to labour and citizenship, how their repression after 1965 dismantled mass-based organizing around work, and how the New Order’s 'state ibuism' redefined women primarily as wives, mothers and developmental volunteers. 

Post-1998 democratization opened space for feminist and labour activism and produced important legal gains, yet decentralization and the rise of conservative religious politics generated new moral regulations that continue to constrain women’s mobility, bodily autonomy and acceptable forms of work. 

The speakers show that women are overrepresented in informal, precarious and undervalued jobs. The care economy functions as a core system which restricts women's opportunities because they perform most of the unpaid care work yet take low-paying care jobs that do not provide job security. 

They conclude that female labour force participation in Indonesia can only be addressed through integrated strategies that redistribute care, strengthen protections and voice for women workers, and confront enduring religious and ideological constructions that naturalize women’s domesticity and secondary-earner status.