Gender Equality and Women's Participation in Indonesian Employment: An Empirical Study from A Spatial Perspective

Abstract

Gender inequality in Indonesia, especially in the field of employment, is an issue and a problem marked by the lower access of women to the labor market compared to men. The importance of women's participation in the labor market will have a positive effect on increasing incomes and automatically improving economic status. The female labor force participation rate (FLFPR) is a measure that shows the involvement of women in the labor force. The objectives of this study include describing the characteristics of the female labor force, modeling the female LFPR using a spatial study approach in the form of the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) method, and knowing the description of estimation results and factors that significantly affect female LFPR in Indonesia using datasets from the Statistics Indonesia database. The results of the descriptive statistics show that the highest values of female LFPR are found in the provinces of Papua, Bali, and East Nusa Tenggara, while the region with the lowest participation of women in the labor market is the province of North Sulawesi. The results of the global regression estimation show that the variables that have a significant effect on the LFPR in general in Indonesia are the average hourly wages of workers (X2), literacy rates (X3), and the mean years of schooling (X4). While the modeling results using the GWR method with a model quality of 53% indicate that the predictor variables that have a significant effect on the LFPR in each province in Indonesia are influenced by different factors so that the increasing strategy of women's access to the labor market can be applied spatially according to the factors involved in the influence of LFPR in each province of Indonesia.