Women to march ahead in politics

The Political Parties Law stipulates that 30 percent of the House of Representatives and the People's Representative Council should be female. But the reality is that only 11.27 percent of the House's 550 members are women.

In the regions, women face challenges in becoming legislative candidates and sometimes have difficulties voting independently.

"Patriarchy is like a plague in our pesantren (Islamic boarding school). Many female voters are forced to vote for the candidates whom their teachers, who mostly are males, have instructed them to. If they vote otherwise, the teachers won't acknowledge them as students and this scares the voters," said Rukayah Maksum, a member of the Indonesian Women's Coalition for Justice and Democracy (KPI) in the East Java town Bondowoso.

"To make things worse, political parties usually take turns at pesantren during the election campaign while exploiting the culture for their own political gains," she said during the KPI's national political consolidation assembly here Wednesday.

Sri Wahyuningsih, an academic and KPI member from Malang, East Java, lamented the general apathy of women in her province, particularly toward getting involved in politics.

"It's really not easy asking around for women who would be interested in becoming legislative candidates. There is a great deal of shyness and second-guessing among the women, not to mention funding concerns," she said.

Another KPI member, Alfianda, who hails from Cirebon, West Java, said many male members of local political parties denied the applicability of the 2008 Political Parties Law in provinces, regencies and municipalities.

"They claimed the 30 percent quota was only applicable on the national scale. Whereas in the provinces and regencies, proportional representation is still the rule of the game," she said. "Obviously, politicians and legislatures in the regions feel threatened by the possible increase of women's participation in politics."

A central figure in the drafting of the law, Tyas Indyah Iskandar of Golkar Party, said the main opposition she received when lobbying for the 30 percent quota to apply across the board was that party executives in the capital and regions alike had in fact come from small and local political parties.

"There were representatives who literally begged us to compromise by limiting the application of the article so as to not hurt the performance of local parties," she said.