Broken Pathways - Transcript

Intro [00:00:02]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Petra Alderman [00:00:09]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration in sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Petra Alderman and I am an associate researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and a post-doctoral researcher at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Ramona Vijeyarasa and Nadine Vanniasinkam. Dr. Ramona Vijeyarasa is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology in Sydney, where she has designed a gender legislative index to assess the gender responsiveness of domestic laws. Her latest book, The Woman President Leadership, Law, and Legacy for Women, based on experiences from South and Southeast Asia, was published by Oxford University Press in July 2022. Nadine Vanniasinkam is a senior researcher at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka. Her research focuses on social inclusion, minority identity politics and religious coexistence with gender as a cross-cutting focus. So I'm extremely excited to welcome you both on the Nordic Asia podcast.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:01:20]

Thank you, Petra. It's great to be here.

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:01:22]

Thank you. It's really nice to connect with you.

Petra Alderman [00:01:26]

So what we are going to talk about today is based on a wider research project that you're both part of, and this project is basically related to women's political leadership and pathways to leadership in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. And this research project is funded by the Australian Government through the Developmental Leadership Program based at the University of Birmingham. So before we kind of delve deeper into what your actual research findings are about, could you tell us a little bit more about the overall project and why are you actually looking at women's political pathways in the context of Indonesia and Sri Lanka?

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:02:02]

Sure Petra, and I can probably get us started. And it was interesting, in the lead up to this conversation, I started reflecting on how many, many months ago Tanya Giacomo, who's our chief investigator alongside myself and Asim from Indonesia in this project. When we sat down to design this, we probably could have picked any country in Asia to be part of this project because there are so many commonalities in the realities of what women go through. So one of the drivers for this project was women's underrepresentation in elected office generally, but then particularly the fact that it's certain women who are excluded from the political space, we know and research shows this, that it's much harder for women from low socioeconomic backgrounds or for minority women to be able to contest and win elections. And yet we also believe both the research and I think us as individuals who are part of the project, that women from diverse backgrounds have so much to offer. Women from diverse backgrounds are highly active in grassroots social activism, in political activities within and outside of party politics. And so we want to ask this question of why are women not transitioning from one space to another? Why is it that women who we think would make really good candidates and be representative to not be able to build upon those skills they have in the grassroots arena and transfer that into formal politics? And it's interesting, at one point in the project, Nadine, I don't know if you remember this when we started defining what makes a good candidate. I think we all had in mind these ideas that people spoke about through the project during the interviews about how they wanted to improve their communities, to do better, to give their time. And so there's lots of qualities these women have to offer. And it's an ongoing question of why these qualities aren't being recognized.

Petra Alderman [00:03:52]

In some ways, it's a very sad reality. Right. And as you said, it is true for across the region. And I know that yourself and Nadine have been focusing on the Sri Lankan part of the project, gathering data during the interviews and focus groups. What are the lived realities of women in politics in Sri Lanka?

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:04:11]

I think women in Sri Lanka, women in politics, in Sri Lanka in particular, there are various kind of intersecting factors that impact their experience of politics as women politicians. So it depends on which ethnicity or ethnic or religious background that you belong to and kind of patriarchal norms and values that these communities subscribe to, the different ethno religious communities. But overall, you also have the patriarchal kind of political structure. There are certain expectations of how one should behave. One should present themselves or perform within the political sphere. So women face so many challenges based on the outward how they appear and how they present themselves as politicians. They are mannerisms, their speech, the way they dress. But also the different social networks and connections that they have. Their family background also plays an important role in whether they are accepted as credible politicians with sometimes coming from an affluent family within a community or hailing from a political, dynastic kind of family also advances your chances to become a political figure. Money is extremely important and a huge challenge for women in politics, and having wealth and family connections certainly is a challenge for many grassroots women who are involved in community activities and social work to kind of transition from grassroots social work to becoming a politician.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:06:01]

I think the way Nadine has explained the scenario in Sri Lanka explains to why Indonesia is such a good country to compare to, because so much of that is so similar, that sort of patriarchal overtones that dictate who has or has not got a place in politics, and that shapes what women can do in that political sphere that's so common to both the countries. I think if we take a step back and even say, well, what does the international community have to say about that picture? Sri Lanka's rankings also reflect that picture. So we know that Sri Lanka ranks really poorly in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap index for political participation. It's something like 73rd, and that's despite having already benefited from the fact that the country did have the world's first elected female head of government, as well as Chandrika Bandaranaike as president. So despite having benefited from those realities, it still ranked so low. And before they introduced a local government level quota at the local level, women represented less than 2% of local government. It's just a shockingly low statistics. And that rose to somewhere in the 20s with the quota. But even the quota still didn't do enough to shift who has access to politics and to make it a more diverse place. So the picture that Nadine has described so well is also reflected in the global statistics. And what the Inter-Parliamentary Union is saying. When you look at a country like Sri Lanka in an Asian context as well as globally.

Petra Alderman [00:07:23]

Yeah, and I think this is something quite interesting because as somebody who is an outsider, not an expert on Sri Lanka, but looking from outside, Sri Lanka has had female leaders. So you kind of forget that the story is not maybe about just particular leaders who actually made it in these top positions, but it trickles down and the problem could still be there, despite the fact that there is a history of female leadership. And I kind of wonder, how do you explain why certain women can make it into even the most powerful positions, whereas the more lower levels or the kind of parliament level, the numbers are so dire and the representation is just so heavily skewed towards the male politicians.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:08:05]

Well, Sri Lankan scholars like Etawah have described this as the facade of a progressive nation. Chandrika Bandaranaike, the former president, was the subject of one of my books, a woman president, along with women presidents from the Philippines and former president of Indonesia, Megawati Sukarnoputri. The reality is that so few women make it to these very hard to attain positions of president or prime minister, but the women who do make it tend to have other assets that enable them to get there. They're often elite women from political families, similar to the picture that we're seeing at local and district and national level politics as well. And it's the other women with diverse backgrounds who don't have the money, who don't have the family connections, who might not be highly educated, including educated overseas that we want to see having a place in the political landscape. So what's really happening at that level of executive leadership is mirrored at other levels of politics in Sri Lanka.

Petra Alderman [00:09:03]

I know that in your research, talk about a broken pathway to political leadership that women face, both in Sri Lanka and, as you already indicated, in Indonesia as well. But can you explain a little bit more what you mean and why is this path broken?

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:09:20]

Sure. I mean, in our research, we talk about the pathway being broken in a number of ways. In part it's overgrown in the sense that it's not that clearly identifiable for the women who may want to contest, it's potholed because it's missing certain preconditions. It's potholed in the sense that certain assets that women bring, they've done community work, they're well recognised in their community level. That's just not recognised. They're not able to transfer that skill set into something that potential voters can see and value, or it's just broken altogether. The resources aren't there or they're mismatched. And women in Sri Lanka talked about having to beg the party for money. And so we came into this believing that fixing the pathway would not only increase the number of women standing for and winning elections, but also the diversity of the landscape. And that's why we talked about the path. Way. However, I do remember at one point when we were writing up one of our research outputs for Sri Lanka, Nadine, I think it was you who said to me, Well, is there even a pathway to begin with? So maybe. Nadine you want to take that further? Maybe we even just calling it a pathway is overstating the opportunity for women.

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:10:28]

Yes, I vaguely remember raising that. But I think the 25% quarter in local government or women may have created that pathway or set that pathway in kind of motion for women. But as Ramona mentioned, there are several potholes that women have to navigate through, and sometimes their journeys are kind of stalled in the process. And to me, I think one of the most important kind of barrier would be party politics. Also where and party politics are always linked to families and family names. So that itself precludes women from progressing within a party. But also, I think the biggest barrier that women face is in terms of campaign financing, because political campaigns require a lot of money and huge grand events and performances to draw your constituents. And this is something that women lack both personally and they are not supported by their parties either.

Petra Alderman [00:11:41]

So I think this is where you can also see what you said before, that if women make it, it is often the women from the more elite backgrounds. And I think that kind of indicates that perhaps that biggest barrier that you just identify as being the campaign finance, if you come from an elite family, the chances are that the money is there and you do have more access to resources that you can mobilize for campaigning. But what you also said, and it really piqued my interest was this idea of the quotas. Quotas have been seen as a measure and countries all over the world have adopted quotas within parliament or local levels of government to actually help women get into politics. But I wonder how has it work in Sri Lanka, especially in regards to diversity? Because what you just said, women do not have necessarily money for campaigning. Does it actually mean that if you have quota more women from the elite backgrounds make it and you lose still that kind of diversity? Or does it actually help promote a bit more diverse pool of female candidates?

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:12:43]

That's a very important question because as you said, despite this 25% quota, a lot of the respondents we interviewed for this study, some of whom entered politics through entered local government, through the quota, said that it was not the qualified women or the women who were capable to engage in politics, who were actually selected or nominated by the parties. But their family members, wives, sisters, cousins of male party members who were in fact granted nominations. So it's not often the capable women who were able to enter through the quota. And so in that sense, the 25% quota has certain flaws in it because it does not allow for skilled and capable women to enter. But it also depends on the parties and how progressive different parties are and their willingness to include women. So there were a few parties, smaller parties, I would say, who pushed and promoted women who had the skills, the knowledge, the educational background and the necessary experience of having engaged in social work and activism, who did push a few women through the quota.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:14:09]

I think that Nadine put that really well. And remember when I first heard people talking about the fact that the quota seats were filled with under skilled or less committed women, I always wondered, Well, once the women get there, do they then feel ignited and they suddenly do want to have a commitment and they are skilled and they are able to make a change. But I think one of the biggest challenges with the way the Sri Lankan local government level quota was designed, it it included an expansion in the total number of seats. So it wasn't just a portion of the existing seats. It created a new set of reserved seats or quota seats. And so it's very hard for the women, whether they went into politics with a commitment or whether they suddenly felt committed once they were voted to be seen as anything other than a quota seat to quota ticket and to be taken seriously. And so I think the design of quotas and getting that right is really fundamental. The Sri Lankan one was flawed in a number of respects, the one I just mentioned, but also was very complicated, introduced through a series of law reforms in 2012, 2016 and 2017 to the point where even people who were meant to be experts struggle to understand how the quota would function, struggle to understand how to avoid the loopholes, and then struggle to be really clear after the election to say, well, this is how many women were voted in through the quota. And so designing it right is really key, especially if which is part of the advocacy for this project they replicated at a district or a national level, that design has to be improved.

Petra Alderman [00:15:37]

I'm really glad that you both have been talking about the quotas and the designs, because I think that's a very interesting and important discussion really to be had. Because you said the danger is that women who actually make it are then just seen as Adam's not that they actually deserve to hold the position, but as somebody who has to be represented and thereby we are letting them in. I think that that is sad because it doesn't actually help the women's cause, right. In the long term as much whether there is or isn't pathway as what you mentioned before. I wonder what can be done to support women. And we know based on what we just talked about, it's not necessarily about ensuring that more numbers of women make it, because that doesn't necessarily mean that the cause or the purpose of it will actually be fulfilled. But from your research and these conversations with the women who are actually going through the process of trying to make it in this male dominated world of politics, did something come up that you felt like, okay, so this is the way that we have to go and this is the way how we can actually support women?

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:16:39]

I think quite a bit came up and maybe I can talk a bit about the framework and then Nadine you can fill it in with what that looks like in reality. It's interesting, when we were doing this project, we kept falling into the trap that so many scholars in this field do, which is to talk about the negative, the party politics and the money. Whereas what we really wanted was to put value back in for what women already had and was being devalued or not even seen at all, because to us we had four criteria or aspects that make a credible candidate. So the end of the project was to say, well, to reconstruct the broken pathway, we need to create a way in which those existing attributes are valued. So we developed a framework which I think is really quite exciting and original from this research, which is to show that to become a credible candidate, women need first personal qualities, so they need skills and knowledge. They need some kind of political capital. That's true. Then in moral standing and presence, they need infrastructure. So you need your networks, a constituency. You do need money and they need a sense that they fit in that they have a place in politics and that it's not going to undermine their drive and their passion to make the world better, which is so what so many of the women are seeking in social work and what makes them sometimes hold back from politics. And so to us, to mend the pathway, we need to invest in all four of those. And so we need to. In terms of the first one, the fact that women need skills and knowledge, we need to make sure that the existing skills and knowledge they have is transferred. If they've grown up doing social work or behind the scenes politics or community politics, they need to recognise themselves and others need to recognise that they already have the skills. If women need political capital and a presence, well, they have so much of that. They're known in their communities. They sit in local communities and have conversations. They're present in doing social work. They're sometimes doctors or teachers in the community, so they're already doing so much. And we need to help them value the existing political capital. Yes, they need infrastructure, they need money and they need resources. But they already have so many social networks. They have a constituency that values them, including women voters. And so it's just about extending the infrastructure they already have and addressing some of the shortfalls in money. And the last one would be that the sense that politics fits. Now to me, I think there's lots to be done here in terms of how to change the image of politics. So women feel they have a place, but also that they feel that their ambitions to do more will be valued and not undermined, not something they have to sacrifice, but also not laughter. That politics is a place where people genuinely want to do good. So maybe, Nadine, I don't know if in terms of the framework, if you can give concrete examples, but it feels when I was talking about that, I could just hear the voices of the women and what they shared in their case studies, because that's how we came up with this framework.

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:19:24]

Something that I'd like to mention is this issue of amplifying their own voices and their presence and the good work that women do, because it's not that they don't have the skills or don't have the experience. It's just that I think what we've found and I don't want to generalise, but most of these women faced issues in kind of amplifying or making known what they have been doing. So I think one of the key recommendations from this study is also to equip women with skills in amplification of the work that they do so that their constituents are aware of their activities. So engagement with media and use of social media is something I think women in particular need to harness or access in their work.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:20:16]

And to do so safely because a lot of women do then talk about how unsafe that space can be. So it can be so helpful for women to use social media when they don't have as large a pool of resources or maybe cannot travel as far distances or be out in the community as much. But then it needs to remain a safe space as well. And they need to be trained on how to navigate social media when it stops being safe.

Petra Alderman [00:20:37]

Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's a proper minefield and there is a lot of gendered violence against women on social media. It's a powerful tool, but it can very quickly become an unsafe space. And if you do not know how to navigate that, that could be, I would assume so quite an off putting factor for these women. What you said about amplifying the skills in the big scheme of things, that doesn't seem to be like something that's not achievable, that seems like something that can be achieved and women probably can be helped in that area. Was there anything else, Nadine, that perhaps came out from your conversations with the women, apart from the amplification, that could help?

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:21:13]

Another interesting thing is this whole issue of solidarity between women, because there is this notion that women there is no solidarity and that women are so competitive nature and how we can also be pitted against each other. So while in our findings, there was this concern about women not having the same understanding of what. Quality is what women's empowerment is, and that being a challenge for women to push this agenda for representation of women and also women in politics, raising issues of gender issues in Parliament, for example. Well, that was highlighted as a challenge. One of the maybe positive outcomes of the quarter is that a lot of organisations in and activists, independent activists are working towards building a new cohort of like women politicians. And this has resulted in formations of networks among aspiring women politicians as well as women who are in local government. Now both the interviews and engagement with these women in our research driven dialogues show that there is a desire for the solidarity between women, not just within the same party, but also across parties, so inter and intra party solidarity, and also this desire for young women politicians to learn from more senior women politicians, which can be a challenge with the whole system of party politics, where you are also pitted against each other because of this whole idea of party politics. So I think solidarity is a nice outcome of the the quota and hopefully that would lead developing stronger women candidates for future future elections.

Petra Alderman [00:23:13]

I find this notion of building solidarity very interesting. And I think building on some of what you said is that a lot of even international support programs that are geared towards supporting women in politics are often motivated by this notion or assumption that once women are in office, they should advocate for for themselves and should advocate for other women to make it. But it's not always the case. And I wonder whether and I think you've touched upon it already, I wonder whether it is by the lack of diversity, because from what we were talking as well, there seems to be lots of different pathways for women depending on your background and your experience, whether you are from lead or non-elite background. And I wonder whether sometimes the lack of solidarity might also be directly linked to the kind of broader awareness of these women and their backgrounds. Are these some of these women more aware than others of the barriers?

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:24:08]

It's interesting. I remember when I was there for my research on the woman president, someone said to me, what were these women in office doing when we were all fighting for the quota? Because there were women who had made it and they were questioning why those women who were in politics weren't also advocating for other women to climb up the political ladder and benefit in the future from a quota. And perhaps it is that they didn't suffer the same. Broken pathway, potholed pathway that they didn't also foresee the need. But I think there's lots of different reasons why women come into politics. And it won't always be to fight for women's interests or singularly be to fight for women's interests. And in this project we've been really conscious of that. We often discuss how the women we supported and interviewed and who supported our research are not one monolithic group, and we've sought diversity ethnically, religiously, geographically. Although in Sri Lanka, those things have an interrelationship, the geographic and the ethnic ties. But we sought that diversity of age of different backgrounds, for example, ability and non ability. And it's interesting how people told the story of why they wanted to come into politics. As one woman who clearly speaks about the Civil War and being dispelled from her community, from war and wanting to come into politics as someone who knows what that feels like, to have suffered the consequences of the Civil War. And maybe that's their priority going into politics, which is as legitimate as any other. I think it's a struggle for people in this space because we came into so much of the political science scholarship informed by really wonderful pioneers who talked about descriptive and substantive representation and what it means. And I think we need to think about women in all their diversity when we talk about substantive representation and value as very legitimate, the way in which they might substantively represent other people, depending on their identities and their multiple identities.

Petra Alderman [00:26:03]

Yeah, I think that's very interesting what you said about the context and the different experiences, because I can't imagine that being the case across the rest of, let's say, South Asia and Southeast Asia, really depending what kind of political issues you're grappling with, those could sometimes dominate maybe over some of the gender issues of the day as well, because I think in some of these contexts, as you said, the need for peace or more democratic arrangements, power enjoyments might actually take priority over some of the gender stuff. We cannot automatically expect that all women who make it will be championing automatically for more women to make that. Nadine, was there anything that you wanted to add on this?

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:26:49]

Yes. Just touching on what you just said about women not necessarily wanting to champion other women, was this interesting finding that most of the women didn't really want to be identified as women politicians? So they said they wanted to be identified as politicians. And this, we think, has something to do with the fact that women can be pigeonholed in what they are supposed to be doing as women politicians and not and also their desire to appeal or to be relevant to a larger constituency and not just women and children. And I was also reminded about another case study that we worked on with this woman who wanted to enter politics because she was denied her right as her father's heir to take over the party because she was female. So there are different reasons as to why women enter politics or desire to enter politics. And this feeling of responsibility towards your constituency because your family has been responsible for this constituency for a long period of time and her being denied the right to lead the party purely because of her gender.

Petra Alderman [00:28:07]

Everything that you and Ramona have been talking about seems to kind of indicate sometimes that we do put too many expectations on women and on their shoulders to become champions of something or to do something. But the same expectations don't always get leveled on men's shoulders. It automatically makes you feel like women, the battles or the fights that they have happen on multiple fronts. And sometimes the expectations are said so much higher than maybe we would place on the average male politician. And I wonder whether that's something as well that any programs or anything that's being done to support women should also incorporate, not put different expectations on female politicians just because they are female.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:28:50]

Well, I think there's a really nice phrase from Nirmal Pure, who's the scholar who said it's the burden of being one of a minority, that you have to do the job well. And so any failing of these women means it's felt by everyone. So I suppose to overcome that, we first of all need more women in politics and a greater diversity so that they're no longer the minority, where they have to bear the consequences of others failings. And I think also the media has a big part to play in this because it's how society processes and views women in politics through their own eyes, but also through the eyes of the media. And when the media is ready to jump, when women fail to meet every one of those expectations or they don't. Similarly for men, I think is a moment of inequality that can be corrected.

Petra Alderman [00:29:35]

It would be nice to be in a position where these women politicians get judged on what they do and not necessarily who they seem to represent and stand for.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:29:46]

I come to this research as a legal scholar, and so, so much of the work I do is around law reform. And we often think about that at a national level. But then it's easy to forget that that's not how politics always operates at different levels. And so if you're a local government elected candidate or an official, you have to do what your constituent needs. And their priority might be roads or flooding or housing and construction issues or a very specific local industry that affects them. And so to be a good politician is to represent that constituency, which would include both men and women and not necessarily always gendered issues. And I think that's where the burden on the shoulders of women is really difficult. Of course, there's a gendered lens to everything. The women and men and non-binary people are going to experience these issues differently and a great politician can acknowledge that and do their best to respond to that. But I think we need to be particularly cognizant of what being a local government elected official actually means and requires of these women in the first place.

Petra Alderman [00:30:49]

Indeed, the research that you're doing and these findings are utterly fascinating. What kind of research outputs are you planning for? Those may be interested to learn more? Where can they find your work? What is in the pipeline? What is already out there?

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:31:04]

Well, I can start and say that we are publishing a few academic articles and thanks to our colleagues like Petra at the University of Birmingham, also some more accessible policy briefs. But Nadine, I think your work on the website that's creating a more visual representation of the research outputs is just brilliant.

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:31:22]

During our process of interviewing and also during the research driven dialogues that we with the women to share our findings and validate them, we also asked some of the women about what they thought about leadership in politics. So these ideas, we are turning into a visual exhibit for the Museum of Memory and Coexistence, which is an online platform that sees managers. So we're currently developing the exhibit and we're hoping to have that up online soon. That's like a visual representation of brief snippets of what women who are currently engaged in politics and women activists think about leadership in general, and the perspectives they share are really interesting. So I'll let you know when the exhibit is ready.

Petra Alderman [00:32:15]

Well, please do, and we will include the link into the podcast description so that our listeners can then actually go on and check your work further. Unfortunately, we need to wrap up. So thank you very much for this fascinating talk. What the conversation today has really shown is that we're willing to talk about these issues more and that we need to understand the nuances behind the different experiences. Because as you said, when we talk about women, it is a diverse pool and often perhaps we do tend to homogenize them as a group. But this came out from this discussion. There are lots of different women and lots of different pathways. So there have to be a lot of different ways of supporting these different women as well. Thank you very much for joining the Nordic Asia podcast. It's been a major pleasure to have you on today.

Ramona Vijeyarasa [00:33:06]

Thanks very much, Petra.

Nadine Vanniasinkam [00:33:08]

Thank you.

Petra Alderman [00:33:10]

Thank you for joining the Nordic Asian podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia. I'm Petra Alderman, associate researcher of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. I've been talking today to Dr. Ramona Vijeyarasa, senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology in Sydney, and Nadine Vanniasinkam, a senior researcher at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka. Thank you for listening.

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