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Many women in academia, but scant research on gender issues
Jakarta Post - February 3, 2017
However, research on gender and women is severely lacking, with women mostly identified as mere objects in studies, a study shows.
The study, conducted by the Bogor-based Sajogyo Institute using data from the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry between 2013 and 2015, shows that women account for least 30 percent of grant recipients from the ministry every year.
More than 30 percent of researchers who lead research funded by the ministry are also women. "The number of female researchers is almost the same as male researchers in the country," Sajogyo Institute researcher Budiyono Zaini said.
The figure is higher than the global average of 28.4 percent of women researchers. It is also higher than the average percentage of women researchers in East Asia and the Pacific, which is 22.6 percent, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
"In terms of number, the gap between female researchers and male researchers is not too big compared to other countries. So there is enough opportunities for women to be active in research," the ministry's research director, Ocky Karna Radjasa, told The Jakarta Post.
However, women researchers are largely concentrated in top universities, he said. There are four categories of universities in the country, rated by quality. From the 3,246 universities in the country, only 25 are in the highest-quality category. The second category comprises only 76 universities.
"These top 25 universities are dominated by the best universities, such as the University of Indonesia and the Bandung Institute of Technology, and they have no problem in terms of gender equity. But how about the remaining universities?" Ocky said.
The rest consist of low-quality, higher-education institutions. "The recruitment of women academics will be very limited [in poor-quality universities], with male-dominated recruitment," said Ocky.
Besides an uneven distribution of women researchers and lecturers, Ocky pointed out that there was an alarmingly low amount of research done on gender and women in the country.
According to the study, only 3 percent of research funded by the ministry was related to gender and women in 2013. This percentage dipped to 2 percent out of more than 12,000 research projects in 2014 and 2015.
"While the number of research projects increased substantially from 2013 to 2014, the issue has been static. There hasn't been an attempt to enrich our perspectives on gender issues," Budiyono said.
Besides the low quantity of research on gender, the quality of gender research in Indonesia is also lacking, he added. "Gender issues are vast. However, gender research here is limited to seeing sex as a research topic," Budiyono said.
The lack of research to broaden gender perspectives has led to a lack of policies that are gender-sensitive in Indonesia, Budiyono said.
"Gender is a national issue that spans many sectors, and universities have to support it because social transformation comes from the scientific world. It reconstructs our society through policy intervention. That's the role of science, isn't it?" he said.
Ocky said the ministry planned to allocate a research budget specifically for gender issues from 2018 in order to increase the number of gender research projects in the country.
"Last year, I launched a new research scheme on social and humanistic studies. But that's still too general. So this year I will introduce a new scheme on gender equity and children in the 11th revision of the ministry's research guidance book," he said.
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