The government has continued to enforce several measures to ensure equal pay for women and men workers, including using a labor watchdog to supervise companies, Manpower Minister Ida Fauziyah has said.
One of the ways the Indonesian government is protecting women is the realization of equal wages, Fauziyah said during a virtual discussion on the 9 Merdeka Barat Forum (FMB9) here on Monday.
“In terms of the norms of laws and regulations, we have removed all forms of discrimination including in wages,” she said.
However, she admitted that there are still cases of women workers earning lower wages than men in Indonesia.
According to the minister, data from Statistics Indonesia (BPS) has shown that the average wage per month for men workers tends to be higher than for women.
The data has shown that the average monthly wage of men workers was Rp2.9 million in 2021, while that of women workers was Rp2.3 million, Fauziyah said.
She also highlighted that the percentage of women workers in the informal sector was greater than men, with BPS data showing that 63.8 percent of women workers were in the informal sector, and the rest were men workers (56.61 percent).
In the primary sectors that directly process natural resources such as agriculture and mining, the number of men workers was greater at 32.9 percent compared to women at 27.2 percent.
In the secondary sectors such as manufacturing, the percentage of women workers was 15.12 percent, while that of men was 23.66 percent.
Meanwhile, in the tertiary sector, such as the service industry, there were more women workers (57.68 percent) than men (43.44 percent).
“We deploy all of our manpower supervisors spread throughout Indonesia to conduct monitoring in companies that still give different wages to men and women,” Fauziyah said.
Source: Antara News