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ABSTRACT
In the literature on women and development, there has been a tendency to view the countries of Southeast Asia as less patriarchal than other parts of Asia. It has also been argued that patterns of female literacy and female employment in the Moslem-majority countries in Southeast Asia are different from those in Moslem-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa. This paper reviews both the historical and contemporary evidence on the role of women in Southeast Asia paying particular attention to four indicators. The first is the extent to which women have been able to obtain employment outside the home. The second is their ability to gain access to at least sufficient education to give them literacy and numeracy. The third concerns their control over when and who they marry, and their fertility within marriage. The fourth concerns the extent to which Southeast Asian societies have been characterized by strong son-preference. The paper discusses whether Southeast Asia is different and the possible reasons for these differences.
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Notes
2 In this paper, Southeast Asia refers to the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam). Their combined population was estimated to be 628 million in 2015.
3 A comprehensive companion to feminist economics contained sections on the economic history of women in various parts of the world, but the only Southeast Asian country covered was Singapore, which for a number of reasons is not typical of the region. See Peterson and Lewis 1999.
4 The term patriarchy, although widely used in the literature, is often not well defined; for an attempt to define and quantify patriarchal dominance, see Braunstein Citation2014.
5 Valuable discussions of Islam in Southeast Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth century can be found in Part VI of Holt, Lambton and Lewis 1970.
6 Lieberman (Citation2003, 448–449) contrasts Burmese with Vietnamese elite norms of behaviour. He argues that in Burma, there were no dramatic differences between the administrative class and commoners regarding female roles. In Vietnam the peasants tended to resemble other Southeast Asians but the higher classes adopted Chinese patterns of behaviour. He also argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sinic models of behaviour penetrated into the villages.
7 Locher-Scholten (Citation2000, 59–63) discusses the evidence on female employment from the 1930 census in detail; her discussion should be read in conjunction with that of Mertens. She argues that the women comprised 44% of the work force in Java, which is a higher figure than that given by Mertens (Citation1978; Appendix .3, .5). This disparity might reflect the different figures on female employment in non-agricultural activities given in different tables in the census.
8 The 1939 Census in the Philippines counted both housekeepers and housewives as part of the labour force, which led to high female labour force participation rates and also a high share of the female labour force working outside agriculture. But it appears that many women who gave housekeeping as their primary occupation were also engaged in other tasks, in both agriculture and other sectors.
9 The 1930 census defined people as literate if they could read the Latin script, excluding those who had been taught to read Malay written in Arabic script.
10 In Brazil, 56% of women were found to be illiterate in 1950, compared with 44% in the Philippines in 1947 (UNESCO Citation1957).
11 Phongpaichit and Baker (Citation1995, 368–369) argue that the Thai government only began to invest seriously in education after the 1932 revolution, but few primary schools were built in rural areas. A rapid extension of schools in rural districts took place in the 1960s.
12 Jones (Citation1997a, 105–106) points out that when divorce reform was debated in both Indonesia and Malaysia after independence, women's groups usually advocated stricter controls.
13 One reason for the fall in mortality in Java was the widespread use of smallpox vaccination (Boomgaard Citation2003). By the 1930s, infant mortality rates were around 140 per thousand in the Philippines, British Malaya and Taiwan (Booth Citation2012, ). They were higher in Burma, Java and Vietnam, although the data usually only refer to particular regions.
14 A valuable collection of papers on the role of women in Asian rice agriculture can be found in IRRI (Citation1985). In their introduction to this collection, Unnevehr and Stanford (Citation1985, 2) found that in most rice-growing regions women accounted for at least one-third of the labour force. This was the case even in the higher income economies (Japan, South Korea, Malaysia)
15 In the Indian context, Anker, Khan & Gupta (1987) criticized the data collected from population censuses. They claim that much of the labour force activity had been unrecorded, and argued that different questionnaires administered by women enumerators would give very different results. For further discussion of the figures for India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, see Nayyar and Sen (Citation1987). A more recent discussion of the data for Bangladesh is given in Mahmud and Tasneem (Citation2011), who argue that much work oriented to the market but carried out inside the home is not recorded in the official data. But these authors do not dispute the fact that many women in Bangladesh appear reluctant to take up gainful employment outside the home.
16 The 2010 Population Census reported an average female labour force participation rate of 55%, with substantial provincial variations. The FLFPR was over 70% in Papua and East Nusatenggara, and between 65 and 70% in Yogyakarta, Bali and West Nusatanggara. While several analysts have pointed to the high variation across provinces in Indonesia (e.g., Jones Citation1986) there has never been a satisfactory explanation which sorts out the relative importance of cultural, religious and economic factors.
17 It is difficult to determine how high female participation rates were in French Indochina, as the French did not carry out censuses, and the labour force data are not very comprehensive.
18 The figures for Myanmar shown in are much higher than those reported by Maung (Citation1997, .6), which were derived from the 1973 and 1983 population censuses. No census was carried out in Myanmar between 1983 and 2014; the 2014 data should throw further light on female participation rates.
19 Female participation even lower in Taiwan in 1971, around 35%, when per capita GDP was about the same as South Korea in 1974.
20 The proportion of women in professional, technical and administrative positions in Thailand has increased over the last 25 years; in 2012 they comprised 11.5% of the total female labour force. But that was still a much lower percentage than in the Philippines in that year (30.6%), in spite of the fact that per capita GDP in Thailand was considerably higher.
21 It has sometimes been claimed that one reason for the very high ratio of women to men in professional, technical and administrative jobs in the Philippines is that many men with professional qualifications seek work abroad. In recent years it has been estimated that over 10 million Filipinos are working abroad, although the gender breakdown is hard to estimate. But skilled migrants are certainly not all male. Many nurses seek work abroad, as do other women with secondary and tertiary qualifications.
22 There are still striking regional differences within Indonesia, with many girls in West Java, and in parts of East Java still marrying in their teens (Jones Citation2001).
23 Jones (Citation2007, 457–458) argues that the proportion of single people in several parts of Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar and the Philippines was higher than in many countries in West Europe, especially among those people who have never co-habited.
24 Cain (1993, 55–56) used World Fertility Survey data to classify countries according to son preference. He found that Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand showed moderate son-preference, while Indonesia and the Philippines showed equal preference for sons and daughters.
25 Other studies use the sex ratio at birth which in most countries is around 104 to 106. Guilmoto (Citation2009) examines the data for Asia and finds that in Southeast Asia the data conform to the normal pattern, whereas in many parts of North India and China it is much higher. Guilmoto found that Vietnam was the exception in Southeast Asia, where it reached 111 in 2006.
26 Braunstein (Citation2014) has criticized the use of religious affiliation, especially Islam, to proxy for patriarchal preferences.
27 Two recent attempts to rank countries according to gender inequality both find that the Philippines ranks higher than any other country in Southeast Asia: see World Economic Forum (Citation2014) and Branisa, Klasen, Ziegler, Drechsler and Jutting (Citation2014). The latter study drew on OECD data to compile a Social Institutions and Gender Index, which ranked 101 countries according to a range of criteria. The Philippines was ranked seventh and Thailand sixteenth, although the Philippines slipped 18 places when an abortion rights indicator was added.