Unemployment rate among housewives on the rise: BPS

Zakki P. Hakim, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

With unemployment on the increase, more women described themselves last year as housewives, the latest labor data reveals.

The 2004 National Labor Force Survey (Sakernas), published by the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), shows that in 2004 about 30 million women described themselves as home-makers, up by 1.17 million from 2003's figures, a report obtained recently by The Jakarta Post says.

Aden Gultom, head of the BPS workforce directorate, speculated that an improving economy could have lead to the increase.

"The economy improved, thus the women might have felt they were secure and could rely solely on the man in the family in terms of income.

"On the other hand, it could be that the competition to get a job has become so tight to a level that it has discouraged women to look for work," Aden told the Post, adding that further studies would be needed to identify the likely reason for the increase.

The report says that out of the 30.24 million unemployed women last year, almost two-thirds of them had primary school educations or less, while only about 1 percent were university graduates.

About 16 percent of the total female workforce was aged between 15 and 24, the age bracket of those entering the workforce for the first time.

Aden said that in the traditional Indonesian family, women, unlike men, were not expected to find work to provide extra income for their families, although they often did so.

In 2004, the country of 220 million population had about 153.92 million of people at working age but only 103.97 million were recorded as employed full-time.

Many of the remaining 50 million were still at school and many more were those categorized as non-working women caring for families.

None of these categories were included in the country's 2004 open unemployment rate of 9.86 percent, up slightly from 9.67 percent in 2003.

Separately, Australian-based Roy Morgan Research revealed that despite the frequent talk of gender equality across the nation, many Indonesians, both men and women, still believed that a woman's place was in the home.

The company found that this view was much less popular among men or women with higher educations.

"The bottom line is that education plays a major role (in determining attitudes about women)," Roy Morgan general manager Felicia Nugroho told the Post on Wednesday.

However, as the BPS report revealed, the job conditions a majority of the nation's working women are experiencing could also be deterring others from seeking work.

Out of the 33.14 million working women in the country last year, BPS survey showed that almost half of them were poor agricultural workers, many of them in insecure jobs where income was only guaranteed if the harvest went well.

Two-thirds of the women peasants, or some 9.56 million people, were working in demanding physical jobs in agriculture, forestry and fisheries.

Jobless women who did not describe themselves as housewives, meanwhile, numbered 4.91 million last year, the survey said.