ABSTRACT
Malaysia’s promotion of national economic competitiveness has come to incorporate a particular policy emphasis on women’s productive economic roles. In this chapter I focus on two key initiatives. First, efforts to increase women’s labour force participation in the formal economy and, second, microenterprise and finance initiatives that either directly or indirectly target women. What comes through in this chapter is that the pursuit of gender agendas within economic policymaking is a contested process. Thus, we see increased recognition in state development plans regarding the links between increased gender equality and economic competitiveness – an instrumentalist logic that is often wholly endorsed by the main agencies involved in gender and development policy agendas in Malaysia. But, at the same time, we see that many actors within the Malaysian state seek to obstruct, resist, and sideline gender-focused policies. While we can observe an increased recognition of the need to confront issues such as women’s exceptionally low levels of workforce participation, at the same time, the institutional frameworks within which this agenda is pursued have become ever more technocratic and corporate-oriented. This has two significant consequences: (a) gender equality efforts come to be shaped by the need to meet measurable targets, and thus only initiatives that are seen as possible to measure get resourced and, (b) gender equality comes to be seen as a technical problem that can be easily fixed (for example, by increasing childcare availability in women’s workplaces in order to boost female labour force participation) without significantly challenging prevalent gendered cultural norms and expectations.
