When I was born in Taiwan, my grandma commented “such a shame that she is not a boy!” A preference for boys was prevalent at that time—and to some extent continues today. My uncle and aunt gave up on producing a boy only after ending up with five daughters. My aunt would tear up from the talk she overheard from neighbors, accusing her of not being “filial” because she was “unable” to produce a boy. In my parents’ generation, this preference for boys skewed educational opportunity towards males.
Thankfully, I was born a time when the economy was booming, when Taiwan was modernizing rapidly, and when women’s education attainment had become a universal expectation. And so I had the opportunity to explore my own interests and make my own decisions. For extra-curriculars, I traded in the usual “girl” activities of piano lessons and painting to pursue basketball and debating—opportunities that would have been unimaginable for my grandmother, who grew up at a time when the foot binding of girls was still a condoned practice.
In Asia, women’s movements have come a long way in the past three decades. Taiwan’s first female president was sworn in last month – the first female leader in Asia whose path was not paved by a powerful male relative (President Park Geun Hye of South Korea and Daw San Suu Kyi of Burma are both daughters of powerful political dynasties).
Remarkably, Tsai’s primary opponent during much of the presidential election was also a female leader, the Vice Speaker of the Parliament (before she was replaced by her party three months before the election). Analysts believe that a quota system requiring one third of all seats in the legislature be filled by women contributes to the rise of prominent female politicians in Taiwan.
The Philippines has also seen much progress in promoting gender equality over the years. Its outgoing cabinet had the highest percentage of female members in the country’s history. Moreover, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Maria Lourdes Sereno, is the first female chief justice in Philippine history. In the most recent presidential election, Leni Robredo was elected as Vice President. Even though Senator Grace Poe lost the presidency, she was leading in the polls for more than three months . Poe emphasized the importance of economic empowerment by urging Filipino women to be financially independent of their husbands during the 8th GoNegosyo Filipina Entrepreneurship Summit in February.
The evidence agrees with Poe. Empowering women economically produces lots of societal benefits, including higher investment in the family, education, and health. Economically empowered women also enjoy stronger awareness of their political rights and face a lower likelihood of becoming victims of domestic violence.
Research also shows that including women makes good business sense: companies that are more open to women perform better than companies that are not. For example, the Fortune 500 companies with the best records of promoting women have been shown to be 18 to 69 percent more profitable than the median firm in their industry. This may be in part because such businesses understand that women today account for 70 percent of global consumer spending—in fact, Harvard Business Review estimates that women represent a bigger growth market than China and India combined.
It is unfortunate, then, that Asian countries have not been very successful in unleashing economic growth through women’s empowerment. Japan and South Korea, for instance, rank at the very bottom of OECD countries on the Glass Ceiling Index released by The Economist for International Women’s Day. This index ranks countries based on accessibility of education, participation of labor force, maternity rights, and representation in senior jobs for women.
The rest of Asia does not perform much better, as demonstrated by the Global Gender Gap Index published by the World Economic Forum, which ranks 145 countries on such indicators as economic participation, educational attainment, health, and political empowerment. The chart below shows the scores for the members of ASEAN+3.
With few exceptions, women are poorly represented in political institutions and find it hard to come by business opportunities across Asia. When they do work, women are often stuck in low-skilled jobs or unpaid work due to a lack of government support, financial illiteracy, and social traditions. In fact, in Asia, women account for only 33 percent of the total workforce, but they account for 76 percent of all unpaid work and 43 percent of informal employment.
This comes at a heavy cost: according to the United Nations, the failure to integrate women into the workforce is costing the Asia-Pacific region about $89 billion a year in unrealized output.
For instance, Japan’s GDP could be raised by as much as 14 percent by closing the gender employment gap—with similar double digit growth reported for other Asian countries. Women-owned SMEs also face a credit gap in terms of their ability to borrow and invest—a gap which, if closed, could push up per capita incomes by over 12 percent as well.
Clearly, the empowerment of women must be at or near the top of Asian economies’ agenda. This is not just the right thing to do but is also good business. No one understands this better than my uncle, who now recognizes that daughters are as valuable as sons: his five enterprising daughters today run the family business—and business has never been better.
Catherine Tai is a Program Officer for Asia at CIPE.
Published Date: June 15, 2016