Unemployment rate among housewives on the rise: BPS

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.