Malaysia has regressed in the realm of womens\u2019 rights with child marriages still being legalized, and female genital mutilation being accepted as part of our culture, among other pressing issues.<\/p>\n
Despite the Pakatan Harapan government placing far more women in key decision making positions than the previous administration, and having a woman deputy prime minister double up as the minister of women\u2019s affairs, the country is still not able to move forward effectively.<\/p>\n
Malaysia is placed 131st out of 145 countries on the World Economic Forum gender gap, an undesirable position for a high middle income country, said Musawah executive director and Sisters In Islam (SIS) founding director Zainah Anwar.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really not enough, I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve reached the 30% quota and certainly not for women in politics,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe numbers are important because at 30% you have critical mass and that\u2019s when change beings to happen. So women still have a long way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zainah was speaking at a forum titled \u2018Contextualisation of Our Changing Environment\u2019 at the International conference \u2018Islam Unsurrendered: Women Rising Against Extremism\u2019 in Kuala Lumpur, organised by SIS.
\n\u201cThe fact remains that we are still living in a patriarchal society and women who are in power are afraid to rock the boat, and still need to strike bargains with the men who hold authority,\u201d she said.
\nZainah isolates the problem to be the combination of religion with state authority. Where the state gives full force and coercive power to religious authorities to impose religion on the rest of society which in turn institutionalises how religion is understood and practiced. That is where polarization begins.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis authority is very often a male authoritative patriarchal conservative intolerant authority. You really can\u2019t expect those who are privileged, who have benefited most from the privileges and the entitlements that they have to lead change.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThose in authority are not going to hand change to us on a silver platter. We cannot depend on them to make the changes we want. <\/p>\n
She added that the challenge for those in the women\u2019s movement is mobilizing on the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do we mobilise the public voice, public anger, how do we make it safe for these women who responded to SIS\u2019 National Survey, about the concerns and frustrations they have? How do we make it safe for them to speak out in public, to verbalise and make visible their anger and frustrations?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really need to get diverse voices, to organize, mobilise and get the numbers out there, and make these people in authority realise that there is a political cost.<\/p>\n
Ending patriarchy is a huge struggle and a slow process, but Zainah remains positive, and refers to the success of the Bersih movement and the support of the Group of 25 as they types of mutually beneficial civil society organisations that women\u2019s rights groups should band together with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malaysia has regressed in the realm of womens\u2019 rights with child marriages still being legalized, and female genital mutilation being accepted as part of our culture, among other pressing issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,72],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7371"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sistersinislam.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}