(Aug 20): Lack of gender sensitivity in education is causing hurdles in getting more women into the labour force, threatening a key target of Putrajaya’s 11th Malaysia Plan (11MP) which aims to turn the country into a high-income nation.

This lack of awareness is one reason why although many women enter and graduate from universities, sometimes at a ratio higher than men, but then drop out of the labour market when they reach their late 20s, said women’s group All Women’s Action Society (Awam).

This is because women are told to focus more on their families and children while men are indoctrinated with the idea that they must work and provide for the family, said Betty Yeoh.

“So you get women who go to university, get educated and who come out to work.

"But when they get married, their parents or their husbands tell them you have to give it up and take care of the children,” Yeoh told The Malaysian Insider recently on the sidelines of the Malaysian Students Leadership Summit in Kuala Lumpur.

The 11MP wants to boost the percentage of women in the workforce to 59% by 2020, Yeoh said, as studies by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have shown that higher women’s participation results in higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

For instance, a 70% rate leads to an extra 2% in GDP, said Yeoh, which is why Putrajaya is serious about raising the rate.

But the rate for Malaysia is currently 53.7%, which lags behind most Asean countries, where women's participation rates are above 60%.

Without gender sensitivity in education, men and women graduates become managers who continue to perpetuate corporate policies that do not retain women, Yeoh added.

“When you’re not gender sensitive then you do not see the need for your company to provide childcare facilities which get more women who have families back to work,” she said as an example.

A big reason why gender sensitivity is lacking is that universities and schools do not cohesively inculcate it into their students’ courses, which is key to changing mindsets, Yeoh said.

In many institutions, teaching about gender is separated according to biological and social function instead of seeing one’s sex and gender as inter-connected, said Yeoh.

“You cannot separate the two because one leads to the other,” said Yeoh referring to cultural beliefs about women which are shaped based on their reproductive roles.

“In some schools discussions about sex are taboo because they think we want to talk about how to have sex,” said Yeoh, when women’s groups actually want them to talk about family roles, discrimination and equality. – The Malaysian Insider