PDI reveals gender side

JAKARTA (JP): The Indonesian Democratic Party is dying to see the country have its first female president, or at least a woman provincial governor.

The minority party reckoned yesterday that Indonesia was entering the age of the service industry where smiles and hospitality were unnegotiable.

"So the key to success is to give a greater role to women in the industry," PDI legislator Soedaryanto told an Assembly plenary meeting.

"Hospitality and smiles are women's natural job while men still need one to two decades to learn how to smile," said the spokesman of the party whose woman politician Fatimah Achmad is a deputy House speaker.

PDI said men were more suited to the manufacturing industry where they become stern, unsmiling foremen whose main job is to make laborers toil.

"They (men) will tell laborers to plug their ears to concentrate and to shut their mouths so they won't demand too much," he said. (pan)