Gender and economic security in southeast Asia

Let us begin with a basic understanding of economic security. There is no universal definition of the term. As Christopher Dent states, as important as the concept of economic security is, attempts at growing the scholarship around it have not kept up with its importance (Dent, 2001). Dent comes close though, in his work on economic security in Singapore, and by extension the southeast Asian region, connecting it with the survival and security of states (Dent, 2001). His is a macro and singular idea. But the idea of state security is not a monolithic concept. Dent himself gives a brief nod to this on his way to expounding economics and state security (Dent, 2007). Picking up from Alan Chong's critique of Dent's thesis (this volume), economic security is also very much people-centred. Here is where this article and Dent part ways. Simply put, from a people-centred perspective, economic security can be defined as procuring a sufficient income for an individual now and into the future, for the basic fulfilment of her/his needs. But, economic security would also include ideas of resilience and stability. These are concepts that are important to an individual's wellbeing, especially in times of crises, as in the global COVID-19 pandemic. Resilience and stability as cornerstones in an individual's life are also two important principles outlined in the doctrine of human security.

In discussing economic security, I place it within the broader discourse of human security and its ideas of survival, security and stability. Human security is not a new concept, its debut being in the Human Development Report of 1994 (United Nations Development Programme, 1994). The concept itself has been studied in academic and policy circles extensively but actual studies of how human security can be achieved (or not), in the everyday lives of people, are few and far between. Human security often winds up as an alternative to what one might term ‘national’ security – as in two separate elements – security of people and security of state. Also, in most human security discussions, we see more discussion on ‘security’ than ‘human’. There is another point of contention: can we really equate ‘human’ to all human beings? As Des Gasper writes, ‘human’ can refer to the human species as well as ‘whatever in human persons and collectivities is considered to be most important, most worthy, most ‘human’ and at risk …’ (Gasper, 2013: 28). So the concept of human security, then, would mean little if divorced from its social or cultural contexts within which human lives are organized and lived. In order to better understand the economic security/insecurity of people, we need to place it within a particular socio-cultural context, which would then give greater meaning to what we are trying to explore. The human security framework provides an excellent platform for this given that it is about the protection and preservation of human survival, human dignities and daily life, as the former Japanese Prime Minister, Obuchi Keizo, articulated in initiating the discussion on human security in Japan and elsewhere (Obuchi, 1999), making the concept transcend cultural and geographical barriers and allowing for local interpretations. It becomes a powerful tool to study barriers to human development, protecting human dignities and sustaining daily lives. It is used in this article with this discourse in mind where gender and economic security is examined. With the understanding that the human security framework embraces freedom from fear, freedom from want and freedom from indignities, we go deeper into the lived experiences of women workers to investigate how gender has become a basis for economic discrimination.

Economic security is the gateway by which other human securities such as food, water, environmental and even political securities, are realized. But it is also the way by which inequalities are magnified. These inequalities are not only of wages and classes but also of genders. Inequality between men and women in particular is the most obvious because it is the most discussed. Such inequalities are also exaggerated when one considers the intersectionalities between race, genders, especially those that are non-binary, and ethnicities. The study of such intersectionalities is of equal import but is beyond the scope of this article. Here, I aim to discuss economic inequality between men and women with a focus on southeast Asian nations.

Of the seven aspects of human security outlined in the Human Development Report of 1994, economic security has stood out as a key variable in establishing sustainable peace and progress for nations in southeast Asia. Heralded for its miraculous growth and drastic reduction in poverty within a decade or so in the 1980s and 1990s, with governments heavily backing aggressive export-oriented economic growth together with investment-friendly bureaucratic and infrastructural arrangements that promoted exports, the region very easily transformed into the economic miracle it is known for today.

There certainly is enough scholarship surrounding the wonders of the region's economic trajectory yet very few examine the more nuanced underpinnings of this region's meteoric rise. As exciting as southeast Asia is to global financial and economic networks, there remains an unpleasant underbelly of inequalities that needs further investigation and exposure. Here, I highlight some issues that prevent inclusive economic development policies that, if eradicated, will steer the region towards greater economic security for the vast majority of people. This is especially so in light of global challenges facing southeast Asia, not least from a distorted view of human securities (in particular women's securities) and economic growth and integration.

As the levels of development across member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN,¹ henceforth) vary, there can be no universal solution to empowering and activating the region's female workforce. The highest levels of active female workers are in emerging economies such as Cambodia and Laos (OECD/ASEAN, 2017). However, let us not assume that high levels of female participation in the workforce are indicative of female agency; instead, they reveal stark economic necessities that compel women to work. The middle-income economies in the region have relatively lower levels of female participation in the workforce, which are indicative of another set of problems: career development and promotion opportunities, wage differentials and an increasing burden of care that takes up women's time. Here my focus is on the emerging economies of southeast Asia, saving a comparative study across the 10 member states for a larger body of work, which it will inevitably lead to, given the vast differences in terms of women's empowerment and quality of participation in the labour force.

The progress of societies and the global economy in the 21st century depends on creativity, innovation and intelligence. These are not gender-specific attributes. Southeast Asian countries should focus attempts to achieve economic security for all and it would be prudent to harness the creativity, innovation and intelligence of both men and women to maximize the productive potential of the full labour force. There are two ways of examining this: that such an understanding, unfortunately, has not been a key motivating force of member states of ASEAN simply because a gendered understanding of labour and the factors that affect participation in the labour force has not been fully considered, or, they have indeed been considered but to the detriment of the female worker. Hence the increased burden on women, which will be explained shortly. Yet another factor that needs to be dissected is the understanding of whether economic and labour policies that encourage women to join the workforce are liberating or just liberal policies. This is tied to notions of empowerment and power dynamics within the neoliberal economic order. I take the opportunity in this article to briefly examine how the adopting of neoliberal policies has moulded both pastoral and punitive forms of governance around women's labour participation and how this has continued to deny women certain rights and equal status in the workplace. Such forms of governance have resulted in economic as well as other (human) insecurities for women. I say ‘to briefly examine’ given that there is a dearth of such scholarly studies to draw from and more attention to these aspects of the governance of feminized labour is certainly warranted. In addition, we also need to consider ideas of resilience and stability through women's rights and decent work when discussing the economic security of women in the region. The COVID-19 pandemic and its assault on global economies have highlighted the instability of several types of jobs, many of which are held by women. Here an opportunity to study the barriers to women's (human) securities presents itself. I will return to these three points towards the article's conclusion.

The idea of women's equality in general and their economic security in particular has been under-securitized in the region due to several factors, some of which will be discussed in this article. Women, of course, are not completely ignored in southeast Asian scholarship. There is research on the topics of women's equality, their rights, their victimization and their economic and political participation, for example, but these do not cohere well to reveal closely the socio-cultural and institutional machinery that drives this inequality. Frankly, there has been no attempt to coalesce these wide-ranging studies under a more coherent conceptual framework, which will allow an examination of interlinkages and deep-rooted causes of genuine disenfranchisement that create economic, as well as other, human insecurities for some. This is what is missing in terms of gender scholarship in southeast Asia (and perhaps elsewhere too). This article is a humble contribution to this end.

A decent introduction to the issues concerning women and economic security requires an historical as well as a contemporary context. The next section aims to do this. Following this, I discuss some reasons for this inequality while also highlighting how the impact of economic (gender) inequality is magnified during crises. I end with a coda – a hope to move forward, to utilize the opportunities created by the current global crises to try and address gendered economic inequalities in the emerging economies of southeast Asia.

Gender, inequality and the nature of work

The economic growth of southeast Asia, both in a historical context² and in recent times, has been on the backs of female workers. In precolonial times, female labour was highly valued. Given the dependence of early societies in southeast Asia on small-animal husbandry and also rice cultivation, which is a highly labour-intensive activity, women's labour was as valued as that of men's (Hudson and den Boer, 2005). For example, in pre-colonial Sumatran rice cultivation the men were responsible for the clearing of jungles and felling of trees and the women and children, whose work stretched out over longer periods, tended to the crops, transplanting, growing and harvesting (Andaya, 1995). This economic value of women accounted for the low female infant mortality rates in the region, compared to those in other regions, namely south and east Asia (Hudson and den Boer, 2005).

There is also the rarely explored study of the role of women's labour in precolonial and colonial southeast Asia. For instance, the trade of Piper nigrum or black pepper was common in southeast Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries and the growing and marketing of the spice was managed by women. Trade in black pepper was common in Cambodia, Borneo, Western Java and the Malay Peninsula but international trade in the spice was focused on Sumatra (Andaya, 1995). Early European and Chinese merchants in southeast Asia often dealt with women in trade. In his work on female roles in precolonial southeast Asia, Anthony Reid cites the following writings of traders who visited the region:

In Cambodia, it is the women who take charge of trade (Chou Ta Kuan, 1297: 20). It is their [Siamese] custom that all affairs are managed by their wives … all trading transactions great and small (Ma Huan, I433: I04) … [M]oney-changing is a great profession here [Tongking]. It is managed by women, who are very dextrous and ripe in this employment (Dampier, 1699: 47) … [W]omen in the Birman country …manage the more important mercantile concerns of their husbands (Symes, 1827, I: 255). It is the women [of the Moluccas] who negotiate, do business, buy and sell (Galvao, 1544: 75). (Cited in Reid, 1988: 634)

The role of women in the economies of southeast Asia today cannot be understated either. In the case of the Philippines, personal remittances from overseas workers reached a record high of US$33.5 billion in 2019, 3.9% higher than the US$32.2 billion recorded in 2018 (Rivas, 2020), and a large percentage (more than 50 percent) of these workers were female and younger than their male counterparts (Philippines Statistics Authority, 2019). In agriculture and food production, especially the cultivation of rice, a vital crop in the region, women's contributions vary across countries, totalling about 50 percent in Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand, and more than 50 percent in Vietnam and Laos (Maslog, 2015). In the Philippines, women's participation in rice production is lower but their participation in farm management decisions and inputs and in hiring of labour is higher than in other countries of ASEAN (Paris, 2000).

East Asia's (China, Korea, Japan and southeast Asian nations) gains in economic growth, poverty reduction and welfare outcomes have been associated with a trade expansion over the last four decades and the region's support for labour-intensive and low-technology export manufacturing is credited for a rapid transformation from a predominantly agrarian region in the 1950s and 1960s to an established manufacturing-based economic powerhouse by the 1990s (Menon and Melendez, 2020). Even within agricultural developments, a sector where women have always worked in some capacity, women's involvement in rural transformation and modernization during this time was limited even though women accounted for a large number of unpaid family workers and were direct food producers, wage workers on other farms and providers of care and food in agricultural homes (Park and White, 2017). What has been largely ignored from an agrarian political economy perspective is the role played by patriarchal power relations in land rights, decision-making and accordance of agency that may have had a decisive influence on the inclusion or exclusion of actors from ‘corporate agriculture and capitalist smallholder agriculture’ (Park and White, 2017: 1105).

The rise in productivity and economic growth that characterized southeast Asia in the 1980s and 1990s has lifted many from poverty and for the most part was somewhat inclusive in gender terms, drawing out significant numbers of women from their homes and into the workforce (EAF Editors, 2019). During this time, economic and political demands of women's participation, including labour mobilities, flexible labour and social reproductions, took on new expressions by which gender relations are lived and imagined (Martin and Dragojlovic, 2019). There was a shift in the gendered roles of ‘mobile men’ and ‘stationary women’ when women, primarily young single women, moved from rural to urban settings or even overseas to work as low-paid assembly workers or domestic helpers (Mills, 1997; Ong, 1987; Wolf, 2006, cited in Martin and Dragojlovic, 2019: 280). Aspiring domestic workers were subjected to homogenizing training before departure, aimed at producing hardworking and obedient, albeit cheap labour, reminiscent of colonial categories of subservient Asian femininity (Constable, 1997) of low economic value. This mode of out-migration of female labour was so important that it led to pastoral forms of governance in countries such as the Philippines where entire institutional and legal frameworks were set up to assist in the process (Yeoh et al., 2020). As a counter-point, when Indonesia saw the importance of women's labour migration as a reliable source of external finance, it employed a specific strategy to keep wages low for unskilled workers (a large number of them women) to gain a comparative advantage over the Philippines (Yeoh et al., 2020). Such punitive measures do little to advance women in the labour force. Inclusion into neoliberal economic systems (or exclusion from them) has always been a gendered process. It is shaped by historical and existing gendered relations (Park and White, 2017) and heteronormative understandings of the division of labour.

The growth of labour-intensive industries in the southeast Asian countries in the early 1980s and into the 1990s was also seen as a way of getting as many people as possible into the labour market to reduce unemployment, with corporations happily co-existing with the state to take advantage of global flows and networks (Rimmer and Dick, 2009). This development, although somewhat understandable at that point in history, disregarded the gender implications of mass employment, which paved the way for systemic discrimination and structural violence inflicted upon women. Women were seen as secondary in the labour force due to their temporary (or permanent) withdrawal from the economy due to childbirth, and a structural undervaluation of conventional women's work (for example tailoring or assembly work), which resulted in women getting lower wages than men performing the same tasks (Birdsall and Sabot, 1991, cited in Bui et.al. 2018: 396). The more technical and higher-skilled jobs went to men who were trained for them. Women remained in production lines, with limited upward mobility in terms of skills and pay (Sundaram, 2009). Clearly, class relations brought out of capitalist manoeuvrings and their intersection with other social categorizations, like gender, have been insufficiently investigated.

Creating physical and political distance between policymakers and corporations on the one hand and female labour on the other has worked well in southeast Asia. There is limited opportunity for women workers to organize and demand better wages and working conditions. In reducing these empowering opportunities for women to look after for themselves, governments were complicit in retaining the low-wage production jobs that women took in the early 1980s and 1990s. The constant low wages of female workers, especially those employed in manufacturing, remain an incentive to attract companies into the region, especially in light of increasing wages in manufacturing giants like China (Tan and Tang, 2016). For example, in Cambodia, the minimum wage for the textile industry, where the majority of workers are women, was just US$61 per month in June 2010 (ILO, 2012). Unfortunately, despite proving their competencies, women find it difficult to translate their human capital into economic empowerment. This is because gendered economic relations have not been established as a zone of engagement, especially when it comes to economic planning, and it has served states not to do so. Thi Mai Hoai Bui et al., in their analysis of gender inequality and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into developing countries, found that although the connection between gender inequality and FDI is ambiguous, their empirical data from countries in the Asia-Pacific suggest that, given the importance of FDI in economic growth, some countries consider maintaining wage discrimination as a comparative advantage in attracting FDI and that foreign investors do favour countries with low levels of economic and political rights (Bui et al., 2018).

Even in the course of later economic restructuring, women's employment opportunities may be discussed but usually there are explanations crafted to justify low female participation in the economy, mostly burden of care, and often the solution for this is to propose reforms – as if nothing is to be gained by exploring prevailing power (of masculinities) dynamics (Enloe, 2014) that exist in international and national business and political relationships between corporate and political elites. Women have often been ‘invisibilized’ in the neoliberal economic development model that is the standard in southeast Asian economies. The pastoral and punitive forms of governance around women's labour that have arisen as a result of the pursuit of neoliberal economic order have locked in heteronormative ideas of women's place in the labour markets. Paying closer attention to what the model entails and requires and being aware of the feminine lives that are altered as a result of being immersed in this model are important if the intention is to establish forms of stable and resilient economic security for the region. This is especially so in terms of low wages for tens of thousands of female workers.

No one person's labour is inherently of low value. Women's labour is deemed ‘cheap’ by particular structural inequalities and persistent narratives on women and girls’ abilities and economic worth, outside of the domestic sphere (Enloe, 2014). When we do not pay specific attention to the experiences of low-wage female workers, we remove them from conversations surrounding labour, employment and economic policies, which then leaves us at a loss to fully comprehend and explain why women's wages are low and why women's labour is cheap. According to feminist IR scholar Cynthia Enloe:

the international political economy works the way it does in part because of the decisions that have cheapened the value of women's work, making it either unpaid or low paid. These decisions are made invisible, however, when they are dismissed as being not decisions at all but merely the result of ‘natural’ processes. Imagining anything as ‘natural’ takes it out of the realm of politics. (Enloe, 2014: 263)

This would also explain why increased male unemployment is more of a cause for concern for policymakers and leaders of states than high levels of female unemployment. The natural understanding is that males are breadwinners and ‘heads of households’ and therefore their economic status and empowerment are extremely important for the family, which is the pillar of society. The woman's role is still seen, in this day and age, as domestic or mostly domestic and their fundamental importance is seen as lying within homes and perhaps within the communities they live in as carers and nurturers. For example, a 2015 study by Indochina Research found that out of 200 Lao women, 47 percent (married, with children) saw childbearing as affecting their work life and vice versa (Indochina Research Ltd, 2015). Yet another report stated that the Indonesian female labour force was extremely low as women were more engaged in household responsibilities (Romain, 2015).

It is naive to assume that large numbers of female workers entering the workforce is a natural progression of neoliberal economic development in countries. Women who work in these low-paying jobs have to very carefully weigh the advantages of keeping these jobs against the inequitable nature of these jobs and being in an exploitative conspiracy between global companies, local factory owners, politicians and men in their homes. Many will argue about the wonders of the neoliberal economic model and the creation of hundreds and thousands of jobs in the region for women. They are not wrong but there is very little understanding or interest in women's experiences in these jobs. So, on the outside it looks almost too good to be true; a perfect model of growth and development with the creation of employment opportunities and with earning potential for everyone. But the setting and retaining of cheap labour, in particular women's cheap labour, is not a natural phenomenon of any development model that promises growth and development for all. Yet we see women's wages in the region continue to stay low so that businesses are attracted to the provision of cheap labour and are encouraged in their ‘race to the bottom’. In addition, while the manufacturing industry with their low wages and unsafe working conditions continue to feed the economic development and growth of emerging southeast Asian economies, the women who form the backbone of this industry very rarely get to enjoy the fruits of that growth. There are a few key reasons for this inequality. I highlight three of them below.

Power, liberation and rights: Three reasons, explored

Coda

The COVID-19 pandemic and resultant economic upheaval present a brilliant opportunity for us to start anew; to change prevailing systems with different intentions and different main actors. That we might face significant challenges in economic growth and development in the near future, both globally and at national levels, is not a new revelation. This is especially so during the time of this global pandemic and in the coming post-pandemic years. But that it would take some 100 years for the gender gap to close and 202 years to achieve some form of economic parity between men and women (World Economic Forum, 2018) should not be an acceptable premise for leaders and should be of great concern to countries looking to build more resilient economies and stable societies. By not addressing the gender gap in the workforce, countries around the world stand to lose a potential boost to global employment by 18.9 million workers, and the vast majority of these gains are said to be in emerging countries (ILO, 2017) like those in southeast Asia. Gender equality, then, is a business imperative.

As the above discussion has alluded to, some form of transformational action is required to take on board a gendered understanding of how economic security works as a people-centred concept. But, how is that to happen if we do not seek to expand the framing of the problem? We understand issues within particular conceptual frameworks to have meaningful changes and imagine alternative futures. The correct (or even multiple) framing of an issue is vital for this in any issue. To not have a proper framework or a singular framework for a complex issue leads to a loss of precious input into policy-making. In the case of this article, put simply, a reframing of the understanding of what economic security in the region means is in order. A human security framework adds greater rigour to policy debates and research simply because it is a concept that is centred on people and their social interactions. These interactions are steeped in power dynamics. A human security framework helps to draw attention to the present and emerging vulnerabilities as a result of this dynamic that are created through various social, economic, cultural and political interactions. But how does human security do this?

Human security is about the protection and fulfilment of people's vital freedoms and the development of capabilities to create satisfying lives for all (Sen, 1999). These freedoms, in addition to what Amartya Sen discusses as positive and negative freedoms (Sen, 1999), also cover the three freedoms in human security – freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom from indignities. In very simple terms, freedom from want illustrates the desire to live a life of one's own values; freedom from fear dictates some form of independence and capability to ensure one's own survival and the stability of life-sustaining activities in the event of downturns; and freedom from indignities upholds the individual's rights of self-expression and even their very existence as a member of society and as a citizen, complete with its own set of rights attached, encompassing the state's role as a duty-bearer to ensure those rights are not curbed in any way.

For the emerging economies of southeast Asia, attempts to incorporate more women into the workforce, which will be necessary to ‘ride out’ the economic downturn post pandemic, should be carefully calibrated. This means that there must be ‘brave souls’ that seek to investigate power differentials in economic planning and policies. Funding for such evidence-based research will be extremely valuable for well-informed and empowering policies to be put in place. More broadly though, I go back to the ideas of neoliberal economic policies. Although this model of development has marginalized many women from economic empowerment, it can still be argued that it has lifted several from poverty. But a fundamental dynamic under the watch of neoliberal guards has been the change in the relationship between people, women in particular, and the state. With the scaling back of the state, it has fallen upon non-state actors to shore up social protection and capacity-building among ‘vulnerable’ women. We see this in southeast Asia through the works of NGOs, micro-credits from banks and ‘projects’ from institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, hoping to ‘empower’ women and build capacity. For all the rhetoric, the idea here was protection of these women from discrimination, appalling working conditions and unfair wages, more than their participation in decision-making and the prevention of structural violence inflicted upon them. That would require an investigation of the power dynamics at play. If non-state actors are the key nodes for intervention, how can the lived experiences of women ever influence the state in economic and national security planning? It is in these areas where a gendered understanding of issues can make the most impact. Here is where we can see both the micro and macro understandings of economic security merging.

Women are a vital force in the economic restructuring of many, if not all, southeast Asian nations. The resilience and stability of their economic security will indicate how well the country is doing in getting back on its feet. Women play key roles in a nation's very DNA. After all, social reproduction and social capital – both vital to the survival of the state – reside in the hands of women, in addition to their production of financial capital. So, it may be time for states in the region to act as points of intervention for gender equality and economic security.

A human security framework, employed to understand economic security vis-a-vis women in southeast Asia, brings together aspects of survival, security and stability of daily lives from multiple and inter-related perspectives – those of wants, fears and rights. Under such a framework, we can bring together a multitude of studies and research areas to get a more holistic, but more importantly realistic, perspective on the lived experiences of women.