Penerapan Konsep MADANI dalam Perkhidmatan Awam A. Women’s Participation Trends in the Labour Force Participation Rate For more than a decade, women’s participation in the labour force has progressively increased from 48.0% in 2011 to 54.3% in 2016 (CEDAW Report, 2018). This positive trend is reflecting on several initiatives introduced by the government, such as encouraging the corporate sector to implement Flexible Working Arrangements (FWA), addressing violence cases for women under Group B40, and conducting programmes to realise 30.0% target women's involvement in leadership positions in both the public and private sectors. The female LFPR continues to progress moderately, from 54.7% in 2017 to 55.2% in 2018 and 55.6% in 2019, but edged down to 55.3% (0.3%) in 2020 (DOSM, 2022). However, only 55.5% of female LFPR will be achieved in 2021, compared to the goal of 59% women’s involvement in the labour force in the 11th Malaysia Plan, as stated in the previous section. On the other hand, male LFPR was 80.6% in 2020 and 80.9% in the recovery period (2021), an increase of 0.3%. As a result, both women’s employment rate and the female LFPR continued to lag behind their male counterparts. This gender parity’s gap became wider due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, and it was believed by the experts that women tend to stay at home and take care of their family members. Besides that, according to BERNAMA (2022), COVID-19 has also proven how vulnerable women’s jobs are and the gender imbalance of care work, which is mostly unpaid labour. Malaysia is not the only one affected by COVID-19. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Report (2022), the employment impact was the most severe during the COVID-19 pandemic (which began in 2020) when all countries implemented strict movement control orders. These include countries in East Asia, the Pacific, South Asia, and South-East Asia (including Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao's People Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Viet Nam). The report also mentioned that there was a decline in employment in the Asia-Pacific region between 2019 and 2020, whereas employment dropped by 3.1% with 58 million fewer persons in employment and a considerable decline in the employment-to-population ratio (from 56.9% to 54.5%), as shown in Figure 3, and with South-East Asia recorded 1.6% employment losses (Figure 4). Figure 3: Total Employment and Employment-To-Population Ratio, Asia and Pacific Source: International Labour Organisation (ILO) Report (2022) 116
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