ABSTRACT
The efforts to increase women’s parliamentary representation in Indonesia have also been continuously pursued through a series of affirmative action policies, especially after the fall of former President Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998 inaugurated the Reformasi era. Since 1999, all legislators at the national and local levels in Indonesia have been elected by popular votes using an open-list proportional representation system. A growing body of research has examined the substantive representation of women (SRW) in parliament; however, these studies have largely been confined to Western democracies. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all interviews were conducted online using Zoom as a virtual meeting platform between 19 April and 13 June 2021. The absence of women’s views and aspirations in the deliberations of the government-initiated Job Creation Omnibus Law illustrates how female member of parliaments fare in advocating women’s interests in the parliament.
