The Malaysian Insight

“NEW Malaysia” under Pakatan Harapan is a mixed bag of progress in gender equality, activists said in conjunction with International Women’s Day today.

Those interviewed are hopeful about new laws Putrajaya plans to enact but also cite the lack of women in top decision-making positions as a persistent problem, and the main reason it remains a struggle to keep gender gap issues and other problems, such as domestic violence, marital rape and ending child marriage, at the forefront.

Petaling Jaya MP Maria Chin Abdullah, who was a women’s rights and electoral reform activist before becoming a lawmaker, said the lack of women in top decision-making positions in both the private and public sectors resulted in “limitations on how women in this country are able to engage in social, economic and political issues”.

“Women are also still far behind men, especially in terms of political empowerment. This is despite women making up 51% of Malaysia’s registered voters,” she told The Malaysian Insight.

“There are not very many women MPs in Malaysia. Only 32 out of 222 MPs are women.”

The former Bersih 2.0 chairman said Malaysians are now more aware of women’s issues compared with the 1980s when she first got involved in women’s activism.

“The government has certainly made some important steps towards this in the last few months,” she said, citing upcoming laws to be brought to Parliament, such as the Anti-Stalking Bill, Sexual Harassment Bill and the Gender Equality Bill.

“There is also a new parliamentary select committee on rights and gender equality, which will hopefully allow for better and more progressive approaches to laws and policies.”

However, she said there is still a lack of political will to address the caning of women as a criminal punishment, marital rape and underage marriages.

She said Muslim women are also still being overlooked in Malaysian family law, unlike more progressive Muslim countries, such as Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey, where there is greater equality between the husband and wife.

Sisters in Islam communications manager Majidah Hashim also highlighted similar issues, such as child marriage, marital rape and female genital mutilation, or “female circumcision” as it is called here.

Majidah said these areas were raised in a review on Malaysia under the international Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw), and Putrajaya should address the observations and recommendations made in the review, as well as under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of its human rights record.

“The government must stop dragging its feet where it comes to serious issues, such as child marriage and marital rape and stop justifying these dangerous acts via its lack of political will,” she said.

Majidah concurred with Maria that the lack of female representation at government level has led to women’s issues “being sidelined or not addressed”.

She listed these as polygamy, sexual harassment and moral policing of women’s clothing, which are still “prevalent” in Malaysia today.

“In fact, we now see the emergence of new issues that we have not before the last elections, such as the caning of women under shariah law,” she added.

Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) officer Tan Heang-Lee agreed that Malaysia has gone backwards with caning of women and a lack of will to act on violence against women who are lesbian, transgender, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

While there has been progress such as women’s access to education, this was insufficient if women remain under-represented in the workplace, boardrooms, Parliament and cabinet, the WAO advocacy and communications officer said.

“Women make up only 14% of members of Parliament, 19% of ministers, and 19.2 % of directors of the top 100 public-listed companies, as of December 2017.”

Lack of women’s representation in Parliament and cabinet means that women have little say over laws and public policies, Tan said, noting that Malaysia fared most poorly in women’s political empowerment, ranking 131 out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2018.

She said this was why WAO and the Joint Action Group for Gender Equality (JAG) have been calling for a Gender Equality Act.

The act will require Putrajaya to be proactive in implementing gender equality in workplaces, and also enable government to adopt temporary measures to facilitate women’s entry into fields or positions where they are underrepresented.

Tan said such an act is in line with constitutional protection of women’s right to equality under Article 8.2 against discrimination on the basis of sex.

However, court cases have shown that this provision does not apply to the private sector and, thus, women in the private sector have no legal protection from sex discrimination.

“This is why we need a Gender Equality Act, which would protect against gender discrimination in all sectors and accelerate the fulfilment of gender equality,” she said. – March 8, 2019.