West Sumatra, Indonesia - © Ihsan Adityawarman
Gender Gap Indonesia — Contrasts in Progress, and a Practice the World Overlooks
Indonesia ranks 97th out of 148 countries on gender equality. The measure most likely to surprise visitors isn't the one usually in the headlines.
ID
Gender Gap Indonesia — A Country of Contrasts
Indonesia’s gender gap story doesn’t move in one direction. On education and health, the country sits close to parity, girls now outperform boys through secondary school, and maternal health has improved for two decades running. On the economy and in politics, progress has been slow and, by some measures, stuck in place: female labor force participation has hovered near 50% for over twenty years, barely a third of the male rate’s ceiling. Indonesia climbed three places on the World Economic Forum’s 2025 index, to 97th of 148 countries, after falling to 100th the year before, a small recovery in a ranking that remains in the bottom third globally.
The dimension most likely to catch a visitor off guard isn’t pay or politics. It’s safety, specifically a widely underreported form of violence: female genital cutting. Indonesia is one of the largest contributors to that global total anywhere in the world, a fact rarely mentioned in coverage that treats FGM as a primarily African issue.
This page follows the same structure as Gender Gap Netherlands and Gender Gap Finland: pay, power, safety, and education, each checked against the relevant UN target. Indonesia sits outside the EU, so instead of EIGE’s Gender Equality Index, this page draws on Statistics Indonesia (BPS), the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection, Komnas Perempuan (the National Commission on Violence Against Women), and UNFPA’s national surveys, alongside the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report.
Pay — SDG Target 5.4
Indonesia’s economic participation score is the weakest of the WEF’s four subindexes: 89th of 146 countries in 2024, at 66.7%. Female labor force participation has sat close to 52-54% for two decades, against roughly 85% for men, a 30-percentage-point gap that has not meaningfully narrowed despite steady GDP growth and rising female education levels. A 2023 World Bank analysis traced the gap to a specific life stage: women’s labor force participation drops sharply during childbearing years and often does not recover, since flexible or part-time work remains scarce and many women leave the workforce entirely after marriage or a first child.
The pay gap itself is substantial by any measure. Post-pandemic research using Indonesia’s national labor survey (Sakernas) found women earning about 30% less than men on average, narrowing to 23% once hours, sector, and experience are controlled for, wider than the global unadjusted average of 16%. The gap is worst among the lowest-paid workers, where women earn 40-50% less than men in comparable roles, and researchers attribute most of the remaining difference to unexplained factors rather than measurable qualifications, consistent with ongoing discrimination in hiring and pay-setting.
Childcare is the policy lever most directly implicated. A World Bank study found that raising Indonesia’s public spending on childcare services from its current 0.04% of GDP to just 0.5% could lift female labor force participation to 58%, a jump larger than two decades of organic progress has achieved on its own.
Power — SDG Target 5.5 and SDG 16.7
Political representation shows real, if narrow, progress against a quota that keeps underperforming. Women held 21.9% of seats in the House of Representatives (DPR) after the 2024 election, 127 of 580, the highest share in Indonesian history and up from 8.8% in 1999. A 30% candidate quota has applied to party lists since 2004, requiring every list to include at least three women in every ten names. It has never once translated into 30% of seats: only one party, PKS, actually met the threshold across every electoral district in 2024, and the quota governs nominations, not results.
Access to power inside parliament lags even the modest seat count. Women hold just 18 of 104 leadership positions across the DPR’s committees, and six of thirteen permanent commissions have no woman in a leadership role at all, including Commission VIII, the committee responsible for women’s and children’s issues. In the executive branch, President Prabowo’s cabinet, at 112 posts nearly double the previous administration’s size, includes only 14 women ministers (12.5%), a decline from 17.6% under the prior government even as the cabinet itself grew.
Indonesia has still elected a woman to its highest office: Megawati Sukarnoputri served as president from 2001 to 2004, and Puan Maharani became the first woman to lead the DPR as speaker in 2019. Both are daughters of a founding political family, a pattern researchers note is common across the region, women reaching the top more easily through dynastic succession than through the quota system built to open the door for everyone else.
Safety — SDG Target 5.2 and SDG 16.1
Indonesia’s 2024 National Women’s Life Experience Survey (SPHPN), run by BPS, the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment, and UNFPA, found that one in three women aged 15-64 has experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner or another person during her lifetime, and one in four in the past year alone. Komnas Perempuan’s 2024 annual report (Catahu) recorded 445,502 reported cases of violence against women, a 9.8% rise on 2023, bringing the cumulative total logged since 2015 to over 2.7 million cases. Researchers who study Indonesia’s data systems have separately flagged serious undercounting in some provinces, including Papua and the Malukus, where recorded violence is implausibly low against other indicators of risk in the same regions.
The dimension least discussed outside Indonesia, and the one this page treats as its central safety finding, is female genital cutting. The SPHPN 2024 survey found that 46.3% of Indonesian women aged 15-49 have undergone the practice, a share that places Indonesia, alongside Egypt and Ethiopia, among the three countries that together account for roughly half of all women and girls cut worldwide, according to UNICEF. Most cutting in Indonesia happens in infancy, well before age five, performed by traditional circumcisers or, increasingly, by health workers in clinics as part of routine birth packages, a medicalization trend that gives the practice a false clinical legitimacy and complicates efforts to end it. Prevalence varies sharply by region, from over 80% in parts of Gorontalo Province to near-zero in East Nusa Tenggara, reflecting how localized the custom is rather than any single national pattern.
Indonesia’s government has moved on this only partially. A 2006 regulation barred health officials from performing FGM, effectively reversed after opposition from the Indonesian Ulema Council, and a newer 2024 government regulation restricts the practice specifically for infants, toddlers, and preschool-age children rather than banning it outright at every age. UNFPA and Indonesian civil society groups continue to campaign for a clearer, enforced national ban, alongside education programs aimed at parents and religious leaders willing to challenge the practice’s assumed religious basis.
Education — The Strongest Number on the Page
If pay is the weak point and safety the hidden one, education is where Indonesia’s numbers genuinely hold up. National literacy sits at 97% with minimal gap between men and women, and Indonesia’s health and survival subindex scores 96.8% on the WEF index, driven by near-equal life expectancy and a sex ratio at birth that shows no evidence of sex-selective practices. Girls consistently outperform boys through secondary school, and women now make up the majority of university students nationally.
The open question is the same one Netherlands and Finland’s pages both ask: why hasn’t an education advantage this consistent translated into economic or political power. Women in Indonesia remain concentrated in the social sciences and humanities and underrepresented in STEM fields, and, as the Pay and Power sections above show, a strong classroom record has not yet closed either the wage gap or the leadership gap it should in theory be narrowing.
RYB’s Place in This Picture
RYB does not run the SPHPN survey, produce the WEF index, or compile Komnas Perempuan’s Catahu report. Statistics Indonesia, the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection, Komnas Perempuan, UNFPA, and the WEF’s Indonesian research partners do that work. What RYB does is connect it to the same global framework used everywhere else on this site. The SDGs Indonesia page tracks the country against all seventeen UN goals; this page is the deep dive into the two goals concerning women and girls specifically.
This is also the data a Culture Women’s Day for Indonesia exists to surface. Visit Culture Women’s Day Indonesia to see how this picture connects to the country’s suffrage history and the wider Women, Culture and Peace framework RYB is built around.
World Economic Forum
Global Gender Gap Report
Indonesia was ranked 100th out of 146 countries in the global gender gap rankings. This ranking reflects persistent challenges across multiple dimensions. Additionally, The Global Gender Gap index score for Indonesia in 2024 was 0.69
The Global Gender Gap Report benchmarks countries on their progress towards gender parity across four thematic dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
2025
Rank: 97 (out of 148 countries)
Score: 0.692
› report
2024
Rank: 100 (out of 146 countries)
Score: 0.69
2021
Rank: 101 (out of 156 countries)
Score: 0.688
Statistics Indonesia (BPS), Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection, UNFPA
National Women’s Life Experience Survey (SPHPN) — Indonesia
Indonesia’s own national survey on violence and FGM/C, run every few years, offers detail the WEF index doesn’t capture. Alongside Komnas Perempuan’s annual Catahu report, it’s the primary national source for the Safety section above.
› UNFPA Indonesia publications
Looking Forward
Indonesia’s gender gap resists a single headline. Education and health are close to settled, in the country’s favor. The economy is stuck in a two-decade holding pattern that a modest childcare investment could plausibly break, on the government’s own numbers. Politics shows a quota that keeps being met on paper and missed in practice, seat by seat, cabinet by cabinet. And underneath all of it sits a safety story most of the world doesn’t associate with Indonesia at all, a scale of female genital cutting that puts the country in the same company as Egypt and Ethiopia, not a footnote to either.
None of these threads move in sync, which is exactly why they’re tracked together on one page rather than reduced to a single ranking. A country can improve on the World Economic Forum’s index three places in a year, as Indonesia just did, while the specific practice most likely to define a visitor’s actual understanding of women’s safety there goes almost entirely unmentioned in the same conversation.
Sources and Links
- Global Gender Gap Report 2025 — World Economic Forum | weforum.org
- Indonesia rises in gender equality, WEF 2025 Index — People Matters Global | sea.peoplemattersglobal.com
- The Persistent Challenge of Gender-Based Wage Inequality in Indonesia — Omong-Omong | omong-omong.com
- Decomposition of Post-Pandemic Gender Wage Gaps in Indonesia — Jurnal Ketenagakerjaan, Vol 20 No 2 (2025) | journals.kemnaker.go.id
- Strengthening the Ecosystem for Women in the Workforce in Indonesia — World Bank | worldbank.org
- The Domestication of Women in Indonesian Politics — Westminster Foundation for Democracy | wfd.org
- Seats Without Sway: Women in Indonesia’s Parliament — Fulcrum / ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute | fulcrum.sg
- The Indonesian National Women’s Life Experience Survey (SPHPN) 2024 — BPS, Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection, UNFPA | indonesia.unfpa.org
- Komnas Perempuan: 2.7mn Gender-Based Violence Cases Recorded Since 2015 — Asia Pacific Solidarity Network | asia-pacific-solidarity.net
- From Harm to Hope: The Movement to End FGM/C in Indonesia — UNFPA Indonesia | indonesia.unfpa.org
- A Statistical Overview of Female Genital Mutilation in Indonesia — UNICEF Data | data.unicef.org
- There Is No Trustable Data: The State and Data Accuracy of Violence Against Women in Indonesia — ScienceDirect | sciencedirect.com
- Women Count Data Hub: Indonesia — UN Women | data.unwomen.org
- UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, SDG 5 Targets and Indicators — sdgs.un.org
- UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, SDG 16 Targets and Indicators — sdgs.un.org
- SDGs Indonesia — RYB Global Development | redyellowblue.org/data/id/sdgs/
- Culture Women’s Day Indonesia — RYB Global Development | redyellowblue.org/data/id/wdid/