In recent years leading to the publication of this book, Malaysia saw its first woman deputy prime minister,1 first woman chief justice and second woman governor of the National Bank. Women are now present in almost all professions and at all levels of decision-making and governance. For many, this may seem like a period of promise for the future of gender equality in the country and, indeed, the gains achieved should not be underestimated. But, as this volume shows, there is still much to be done to provide women with a fair opportunity to participate meaningfully in paid work and advance in their careers. Gender equality is still far from achieved in the Malaysian workplace.
This book shares the broad feminist goal of many language and gender studies, which is to redress the gender inequalities in society that are reflected in, and perpetuated by, language use. More specifically, it examines how professional discourses in womenâs media (re)construct, legitimise and contest unequal gender arrangements and relations in Malaysian workplaces. Professional discourses are, in the Foucauldian sense, systems of statements and practices that say something about employed women and their identities, behaviours, dispositions, aspirations, opportunities and choices. As practices that âform the objects of which they speakâ (Foucault 1972, 49), they create possibilities and constraints for who women can be and what is regarded as desirable, normal and acceptable, which may privilege the status quo. Given the interpenetration of public and domestic life, professional discourses include those on family roles that facilitate or limit womenâs participation and advancement in the workplace. This study focuses on professional discourses in womenâs mediaâthat is, media whose target audience is womenâas research has shown that they are important sites for the (re)production of hegemonic gender norms and the regulation of feminine subjectivities, including work subjectivities. In this book, I interrogate the regulatory ideals established by Malaysian womenâs media against which employed women are exhorted to measure themselves and contextualise their work-related experiences, relationships and conflicts. These media serve as a useful gateway for identifying the powerful professional discourses circulating within the wider society. As discourses in the media are shaped, in part, by prevailing gender ideologies and broader societal discourses, analysing them can shed light on cultural understandings of women and work that need to be addressed to achieve gender balance in the professional domain.
Given that discourses emerge from particular socio-economic climates and historical conditions, it is necessary to first understand the national context from which the media discourses arise. In this chapter, I explore the gains and gaps in womenâs engagement in Malaysiaâs formal workforce in the past sixty years. The first section traces the developments leading to womenâs large-scale entry into the formal labour market following the years after independence in 1957. It highlights the sexism that they endured, which, though lessening, still exists today. The second section looks at the reasons behind why despite rapid initial growth, womenâs labour force participation rate (LFPR) remains far behind that of men. The chapter then moves on to discuss three important gender inequality issues in Malaysian economic spaces, namely the gender leadership gap, sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. Through this, I show how the approaches taken to integrate women into formal economic development have not effectively addressed womenâs rights and challenges in the workplace. Lastly, I outline the studyâs aims and scope as well as the structure of this book.
It is important to note that the account in this chapter is not a linear narrative of progress since progress cannot be solely measured by womenâs entry into the labour market or the rise of an elite cadre of women. Many of the gender- and class-based issues that developed in twentieth-century workplaces still persist today, and I highlight these below. In addition, although women were not always such visible participants in the nationâs labour force and decision-making structures, this does not mean that they did not work. In pre-independence Malaya, many women bridged the public and private spheres at the same time as unpaid family workers who laboured on the family farm, cared for livestock or helped out the family business. However, because paid employment was perceived as a male domain, women wage workers were small in number and largely confined to low-paying occupations (Kaur 2000). Finally, I must stress that while this study strongly focuses on womenâs access to and progress within the formal economy, it does not devalue reproductive labour or those who perform it. In this book, I have consciously shunned terms such as ânon-working mothersâ to avoid constructing domestic labour as ânon-workâ. What I hope is that this research will contribute towards a more equitable future in which women have actual freedom to pursue real choices in terms of how they wish to live their lives and achieve their full potential.
Womenâs Mobilisation into the Labour Force
When the country gained independence in 1957, merely a quarter of the wage-earning workforce were women. Since then, womenâs LFPR has expanded from 30.8 to 55.8% in early 2020 (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2020; Ministry of Women and Family Development 2003). The mobilisation of women into the Malaysian workforce was strongly driven by the nationâs pursuit of export-oriented industrialisation. From the 1970s, the government began establishing industrial estates and free-trade zones for the manufacturing subsidiaries of multinational companies that wanted to flee escalating labour costs at home and relocate their labour-intensive production systems in cheaper developing countries (Kaur 2000; Ong 2010). These foreign-controlled plants were keen to recruit young women, though this was not a purely positive turn of events for women. The global expansion of labour-intensive manufacturing has relied on the exploitation and control of low-waged female labour and it was no different in Malaysia. The firmsâ preference for women workers partly stemmed from the idealised caricature of the docile, diligent and nimble-fingered âfactory girlâ with a natural propensity for monotonous work. This global stereotype was reproduced in Malaysian plants through corporate and state-level practices of control, including restrictive anti-union policies and gender hierarchies2 that confined many women to low-wage assembly line work and subjected them to intense forms of factory discipline (Elias 2005, 2020).
Another motivating factor for hiring women in the factories was economic. The working class were poorly paid, but the female proletariat, who were doubly oppressed because of their gender and class, represented the lowest cost, with wage levels between 75 to 80% of those of men in comparable occupations (Kaur 2000). Young rural women, in particular, were not only cheap to employ, but also easy to recruit due to âtheir relative oversupply and the eagerness of peasants, village elders, and local institutions to send otherwise non-cash-earning village women to the [free-trade zones]â (Ong 2010, 153). Falling commodity prices and the progressive loss of farmland owing to agricultural and industrial policies was increasing dispossession of peasants and poverty in rural society. In response, the government rapidly expanded manufacturing industries across the Malaysian Peninsular (Ong 2010). The growth of manufacturing job opportunities induced thousands of young rural women to obtain jobs in the industrial estates (Ng and Chee 1996). Industrialisation in the country, thus, became as much women-led as export-led. In fact, as Ng et al. (2006) point out, Malaysiaâs economic success came on the backs of lowly paid women. However, as unskilled workers, these women were the least likely to benefit from the countryâs economic growth. Wages in female-dominated industries like clothing and textile were not only lower than those in male-dominated ones, but also suppressed as firms sought out new supplies of cheap labour (Elias 2009; Ministry of Women and ...