People carrying placards take part in a rally calling for gender equality and opposing gender discrimination during International Women's Day in Jakarta on March 8, 2024. - Reuters
JAKARTA (Jakarta Post/ANN): Activists and a state-affiliated women's rights agency have spoken out against “embedded sexism” in the government and say an ongoing controversy over the website names of regional administration institutions demonstrates the prevalence of sexism in the public sector.
Regional administration institutions have been in the spotlight in the past week amid reports that they are using sexually inappropriate names for the websites of their programs. Many of the websites use slang for the female reproductive system or similar sexual innuendo for their acronyms, such as sipepek and siska ku intip.
Government-sanctioned independent body the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) has said these incidents are undeniably sexist because the names used were clearly making vulgar jokes related to women’s body parts.
“We ask for the regional government to change [the names of the websites],” Komnas Perempuan chairwoman Andy Yentriyani said, as quoted by kompas.com earlier this month.
The Cirebon regency administration in West Java, which has received among the most scrutiny for the name of its health service program website sipepek, last week changed the portmanteau to sipepeg following the controversy. The administration claimed it never intended to disrespect women and that the name used was Cirebon dialect for “all-encompassing”.
In response to the claim, Komnas Perempuan deputy chairwoman Mariana Amiruddin asked all state institutions to be sensitive in naming their websites and only “use a word in Indonesian or a regional language that contains wisdom or expresses honor”.
Mariana also said that other websites such as sisemok and simontok objectified women.
Jakarta-based feminist activist and writer Olin Monteiro said these sorts of sexist jokes had long been normalized in society. “In the past, people always referred to women’s bodies or parts of women's bodies as a joke, comparing them to objects such as guitars for being voluptuous, or comparing them to cakes,” Olin told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
The controversial website names also led Olin and other activists to point out deep-seated sexism in the central government and its workplaces, as shown in past incidents involving former officials.
Former General Elections Commission (KPU) chairman Hasyim Asy’ari was included in the example. The ethics council that ordered his removal from the post for sexually harassing a female overseas poll administrator also found that he had made sexist jokes to the woman about her underwear.
Another subject of controversy were remarks made last year by then-coordinating political, legal and security affairs minister Mahfud MD, who suggested that the wives of graft convicts often put pressure on their husbands to live beyond their means, causing the men to resort to corruption.
“[These cases of sexism in the government] came from their sexist behaviors in their workplace. That’s why those website names could exist,” Olin said.
Eva Kusuma Sundari, a board member of the Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), said she believed that sexism in Indonesia was “the product of poor education” in schools and other institutions.
“This is the failure of our education system. It should have fostered morality, respect and tolerance, but what we have now ends up supplying discriminatory and sexist behaviors everywhere, including among government officials, police officers and politicians,” she told the Post on Thursday.
This, she added, called for “genuine education reform” with a curriculum that supported equality on all fronts, as well as awareness campaigns in police and government institutions.
“The sexism issue has to be countered, and the government itself needs to have a hand in countering sexism problems through education,” said Eva, a NasDem Party politician and a former two-time lawmaker from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).
Activist Olin noted the need for training on gender equality and diversity among civil servants, including understanding the Sexual Violence Eradication Law, which “must be implemented seriously in all state institutions from the national down to the village level”.- Jakarta Post/ANN
