Executive Director of the Business Coalition for Women Empowerment (IBCWE)
She almost came to women empowerment by accident, but is 100% determined to bring gender equality into business conversations to prove that women’s empowerment is not just a philanthropic virtue-signalling: it is also based on fundamental economic rationales.
Maya grew up in an environment with few gender stereotypes. Her parents gave her and her brother equal choice to do either dance or martial arts – she eventually opted for the second. Maya later pursued a twenty-year career in HR, free of the “work-family life balance” puzzle, with no dependent children at home. When Shinta Kamdani (see page X) invited her to join the Indonesian Business Coalition for Women Empowerment (IBCWE), along with other gender equality advocates, she did not fully identify with the mission.
She was once given the task to put on these “gender lenses” everyone talked about by looking around and investigating who among her family and friends had stepped away from their career. This is how she suddenly realized how frequently women had quit their job after a marriage or a pregnancy. She also remembered all the high-potential female talents she had recruited in her career, who had resigned while on the way to top leadership positions. She thought about a promotion she had missed, or the sexual harassment which made her leave her first job 25 years ago.
That is how Maya became full-time engaged in the IBCWE, a membership-based organization founded in 2016 and composed of about 20+ enterprises focusing on gender equality in the workplace. IBCWE provides a wide range of services to help its members shape a gender-sensitive corporate environment. Activities range from gender sensitisation workshops to the design and assessment of gender policies, as well as HR support through the access to curated female talent networks.
“Gender lens is not just a checkbox exercise”, insists Maya. “It requires to look at the needs of both men and women when making a decision, and to consider how this decision will affect them differently”. Even well-intentioned policies could bear unconscious bias and trigger negative effects. The Indonesian labour law for instance, states that employers have to pay for return/round trip transport for women doing a late shift. This is in fact a lose-lose measure. First, it assumes that men are not exposed to harassment or night violence, thus failing to give them equal safety guarantees. Second, it plays against female candidates, who now represents a higher cost compared to their male competitor.
To address this kind of issue, IBCWE encourages good-practice sharing between its members and distinguishes best-in-class with the Economic Dividend for Gender Equality (EDGE) – a voluntary business certification based on international assessment standards. Maya believes that good-will talks on women empowerment do no harm, but will fail to catalyze change in workplace policy-making and practices.
It is now time for businesses to consider gender inequality as a serious drawback to their sustainable growth. “If Indonesia wants to be among the world’s five largest economies over the next 50 years, it is imperative to better value women’s role in the process of economic growth” she urges.
