Juanita Elias, Gender Politics and the Pursuit of Competitiveness in Malaysia: Women on Board, Routledge, 2020; hbk £96, ebk £24.04.
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RATING: 80
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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This valuable case study of the 'gender politics of economic competitiveness' in Malaysia understands it as 'efforts to promote gender equality via a competitiveness framing, alongside the contestations and tensions over its implementation' (3). And indeed, the interest of the Malaysian case is that it has consistently pursued competitiveness in the global economy since the launching of the Vision 2020 strategy in 1991, and that it has specifically identified women as an asset to be developed in pursuit of this strategy. As the 2006-2010 plan put it: 'Women will be equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to enable them to be more competitive and versatile to meet the needs of a knowledge economy' (cited p. 41). The lead was taken from 2011 by the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) located in the Prime Minister's Office, building on a long history of fascination with Key Performance Indicators and other trappings of New Public Management - the parallel with Blair's Delivery Unit was not coincidental, as its former head turned McKinsey associate, Michael Barber, was directly involved in its creation. Elias has no need to tease hidden meanings from obfuscatory rhetoric, as the government was transparent in its instrumental approach: declaring 2018 to be 'women's empowerment year', it helpfully confided that its purpose was to 'drive women into the fourth industrial revolution' (ibid). It's 'empowerment' of women has been limited to elite initiatives operated through entities close to the government and reflective of the alliances underpinning it, with opposition and grassroots women's organisations marginalised. In turn, the latter are active in campaigning on a range of issues from violence against women to migrants' rights, but are marginalised from the federal state, and not necessarily motivated to oppose policies, however liberal and minority-focused, that can still be characterised as 'pro-women' in character (90). So Elias quickly establishes that it is Malaysia's embrace of an agenda of economic competitiveness that has driven its approach to 'gender equality', and that it has primarily entailed an emphasis on increasing women's productive economic activity, and specifically their labour force participation rate and their entrepreneurial capacity. This being so, she turns the spotlight on to the implications for social reproduction, noting that such policies, rather perversely, 'reflect an increased recognition of the significance of women's social reproductive roles inasmuch as these roles are seen to act as a barrier to women's full economic participation' (ibid). She has produced a critical study which demands attention not only as a contribution to critical political economy, but also by virtue of the fact that the Malaysian case is so directly aligned with the global agenda of competitiveness, and has been pursued with extensive input and support from the World Bank, the OECD and the UNDP (51-2), and hence is significant in itself. And as it is delivered in 130 pages, notes and all, without wasting a word or skipping over the nuances of the issues raised, it invites and should receive a wide readership. It addresses a central issue in critical political economy - the global significance of the politics of competitiveness arising from the massive expansion of the world market over recent decades, and shows how the process is intrinsically gendered, so making a contribution to each of the literatures it brings together; and along with Rudnyckyj’s equally impressive case study of Islamic finance in Malaysia, it provides a strong basis for understanding the specifics of the Malaysian case, and its comparative significance. It can usefully be read, too, alongside the earlier collection on everyday politics in Southeast Asia edited by Elias and Lena Rethel. It's fair to say that the electronic version is reasonably priced, unlike some, but even so the publishers would be well advised to make it available in paperback.
The first substantive chapter provides an overview of the pursuit of competitiveness in Malaysia, where the state has sought consistently over recent decades to 'climb the ladder' of development and transform the position of the country in the global economy. The second addresses the effort to transform women's economic participation, which has been an integral part of the strategy. The third examines the wider social and cultural context in relation to the family, Islam, and the 'moral political economy of competitiveness'. The fourth details the primary focus on 'market feminism' through an account of the effort to raise the percentage of women on company boards, and the fifth looks at the sharply class-differentiated character of the resulting pattern of social reproduction. A brief conclusion then considers the comparative implications of the case.
Elias organises her analysis around three related themes. First, she notes 'widespread attachment to the idea that women's increased representation in economic and financial leadership generates wider economic benefits in terms of growth, productivity and national economic competitiveness'; second, she argues that 'a concerted focus on women's economic empowerment can lead to an effective neglect of a wider range of women's policy agendas and may even be deployed in ways that detract attention from ingrained patriarchal privileges that operate within political, economic and legal systems'; and third, she remarks that Malaysia's gender and competitiveness agenda has provoked 'pushbacks and conflicts over the appropriate role of women in Malaysian society ... both inside and outside of the state' (2-3). The story, in short, is a familiar one - 'how efforts to promote gender equality have been co-opted into state efforts to deliver national economic competitiveness' (4). Elias sets the narrow politics of instrumental feminism in a broader context, considering 'how a concern with national economic competitiveness ... intersects with a gendered politics of nationalism in which women are viewed as the group in society that serves to reproduce, parent, and educate a country's "human capital"' (5). In doing so, she usefully extends a literature that, as she notes (8), has focused mainly on leading international organisations and the corporate sector.
The account of the promotion of competitiveness in Malaysia starts from the fundamental point that it was conceived and launched with the objective of fitting Malaysia for successful integration into global 'neoliberal' circuits of capital, anchored obsessively to international benchmarks of competitiveness, and pursued through 'technocratic' strategies that sought to shield it from political contestation, in which key performance indicators and international consultants loomed large: Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who launched the 'Vision 2020' competitiveness project in 1991 during his first period in office (1981-2003) and returned to power in 2018, insisted that the goal was 'an economy that is subjected to the full discipline and rigour of market forces' (cited p. 24). This specific form of 'state-led' development ran in tandem with and also entailed potential contradictions with the state policy of support for indigenous Malay interests; it was decidedly hostile to the political organisation of the working class; and it sought in particular to bring professional women into the workforce, and to recruit women more generally into factories linked to foreign capital and located in global value chains, as part of a larger strategy to develop 'flexible, productive, skilled, and competitive workers' (31).
Against this background, Chapter Two turns to the 'very specific set of policy agendas concerning the need to build a flexible, skilled, and competitive workforce in which women are positioned as untapped resources' (40), and as noted above, goes on to explore the contradiction involved in 'viewing women's responsibilities for social reproduction only ever as a hindrance to their greater economic participation' (ibid). With rates of female labour force participation lagging in comparison to neighbouring Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, in part because of a strong tendency for highly educated professional women who left work to have children not to return to the formal sector later, the Malaysian government turned its attention particularly to these middle-class women, conceptualised as 'lost talent' (41, 53, 55). Elias addresses the broader process of development in terms of 'state transformation mediated by gender relations', in order to accentuate the centrality of latter, describing her approach as a 'feminist perspective on the internationalisation of the state' that shows how 'an ethnicised gender regime centred on the state is undergoing significant transformation under international conditions of disciplinary neoliberalism' (44). She reviews the content of successive state development plans from 1966, concentrating on the last fifteen years in particular, details the extent of direct collaboration with the World Bank and the OECD (and on a somewhat different agenda with the UNDP), and raises two concerns: first, that 'a lack of gender expertise within the state means that programmes are often partial and fail to consider how increases in women's productive economic roles need to be matched by sustained and real commitments to addressing women's social reproductive burdens', and second that 'this problem is compounded by the reification of national economic competitiveness in policy-making' (52).
This leads to a discussion of TalentCorp, a government agency initially established to lure Malaysians working abroad to return, but later 'more closely involved with the issue of women's labour force participation, running a series of programmes and projects designed to assist highly skilled women to get back into employment' (55). Elias derives from an exploration of its web portal flexworklife.my the conclusions that the women it profiles were always likely to return to work, that private sector employers are not doing much to help, and that the availability of low-paid migrant domestic workers (who can be monitored in real time over domestic CCTV) is crucial (55-6). I recommend a visit to this (English language) site. When I accessed it (30 April), I came across a profiled video in which one woman expressed particular gratitude to a sympathetic line manager who 'allowed her to leave work on time' (a concession that has real meaning in Malaysian corporate culture, but still), and there is much more of interest. Elias points out that there is little state investment in care for children up to the age of four, or corporate investment in childcare facilities, and that the issues of declining fertility and an ageing population are 'almost completely unaddressed' (57, citing Crinis and Bandali, 2017). Female entrepreneurship in the form of microenterprise development through microfinance has been strongly supported, and Malaysia's IAZAM scheme has been profiled by the World Bank as a form of 'productive welfare' (58, citing World Bank, 2014: 81). This scheme consists of a series of income generation programmes situated within the National Key Results Area aimed at raising the living standards of low-income households; others target 'aspirational' women and offer skills training and development focused on service sector activities such as digital marketing and other forms of online work. But there is little evidence of significant impact in either case. Elias concludes here, then, that the 'desire to increase women's engagement in productive work was not met by a wholesale transformation to the state welfare regime', and specifically with any 'significant shifts in the state's familial, anti-welfare model of social care provisioning (61). Chapter Two concludes, then, with the observation that 'the reification of the figure of the middle-class urban woman in state gender policymaking serves not only to uphold forms of inequality, but also to actively create the conditions through which a racialised underclass of workers is produced' (ibid): this is developed further in Chapter Five.
Chapter Three explores the way in which 'deeply gendered moral values (including religious values) are articulated within the politics of competitiveness promotion', observing that 'forms of religiosity, spirituality, and commitments to leading a moral and virtuous life have been enfolded into the politics of competitiveness promotion; serving to legitimise processes of market deepening, opening up new opportunities for marketisation, yet also providing a source of resistance entrenched in gendered notions of tradition' (64). It addresses the manner in which 'the "gender and competitiveness" agenda developed alongside commitments to maintaining the economic significance of and idealised "traditional" Malay(sian) family life rooted in adherence to various forms of religiosity, and Islam in particular' (65). The chapter provides three perspectives on these issues: the MyKasih initiative intended to expand the reach of the market economy into the everyday lives of the poor, projects aimed at 'family strengthening', and the symbolic role that women and gender roles play in Islamic politics. The composite picture that results brings out complementarities and contradictions in equal measure, and I add a brief discussion of a more recent development that highlights further some of the issues involved.
The MyKasih programme was piloted with 25 families in 2008, and claimed to have reached more than 230,000 families by 2016, backed by the state and leading corporations such as the national oil company Petronas, and HSBC. It provides food aid through cash transfers, counselling, educational bursaries, financial literacy training, and skills training programmes. Recipients of food aid make their own choice of purchases from participating retailers, and the Foundation emphasises the status of recipients as autonomous consumers. This goes along with a strong message on community, and a marked focus on women in the training programmes offered for both skills and financial literacy. The emphasis, then, is on strengthening the capacity of families to manage themselves and their finances responsibly, and eventually become solvent and productive. This complemented policies aimed at 'strengthening' families as units of social reproduction: although the 1984 New Population Policy goal of an eventual population of 70 million had quickly been abandoned (in 1992) as the already slowing fertility rate dropped sharply, a focus on reproductive roles continued: the 2010 National Plan promised programmes aimed at 'strengthening marriage and promoting equal sharing of resources, responsibilities and tasks', while celebrating women as 'the cornerstone of happy families and the essence of a successful nation' (cited p. 71). The National Population and Family Development Board (LPPKN), located in the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, is central here, with its focus on the family as a site for the building of human capital. Elias detects a deep conservatism behind the official commitment to equal roles, reflected in a 'moral agenda that presents the heteronormative family unit as a transitioning, yet essential, component of development success' (72). Against the background of moral panics over juvenile delinquency, rising divorce rates, the passing of responsibility for raising children over to migrant domestic workers, and the rise of 'commuter families' and of teen pregnancy and the abandonment of babies by unwed mothers, LPPKN programmes with links to religious organisations advised abstinence to young single women, offered 'recovery' programmes for 'same gender attraction', and strongly promoted conservative 'family values'. As Elias points out, when such programmes seek to present Islamic teachings on the family, they address the reality of the urban Malay middle classes, and counsel women on finding a balance between their working and domestic lives (an issue strongly featured in the flexworklife material cited above). So an extended statement from the vice president of Wanita ISMA is written from the perspective of 'a career woman like me', and acknowledges the difficulty of the continued duty 'to be the best mothers to [our] children' (cited p. 76). At the same time, Islamic organisations, particularly those connected to the state, have embraced the need to be supportive of the main lines of development laid down by the government: Elias concludes that 'we should view neither domesticity nor religiosity as somehow at odds with the Malaysian project of economic modernisation, but as enmeshed with in it and, in many ways a product of, the country's economic expansion' (79). Even so, there are clearly underlying tensions. For example, the tendency for middle-class professional Muslim women to give up work to care for families and pursue their religious interests is at odds with the larger project of getting such women back into the labour force once their children can access state pre-school centres.
Overall, the conclusion that the 'tethering of market life to moral prerogatives' has not been straightforward is persuasive. In part this relates to the range and diversity of Islamic and other religious organisations, by no means all of which are close to the state. In part, too, it stems from the fact that leading bureaucrats in various ministries, including the Prime Minister himself and many in the key Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, have little knowledge or awareness of gender issues, and hold strongly conservative personal opinions on the role of women (49, 69, 86). This was recently demonstrated in a story that went round the world, when the Women's Ministry itself offered the advice in March that in the circumstances arising from lockdown in response to Covid-19, women should keep their standards by wearing make-up and dressing neatly even if they are staying inside, refrain from 'nagging' their husbands if they prove inept at basic domestic tasks, and even adopt the comedy squeaky voice of the popular Japanese robo-cat Doraemon to convey corrective guidance if necessary - patronising, essentialising and infantilising all at once, and later compounding the fault by explaining that the advice was offered with the best of positive intentions, and they were sorry if some had found it insensitive (Guardian, 31 March 2020, and a host of other online sources).
Chapter Four then profiles non-state actors who have 'cultivated close relationships with the state and have provided significant support for forms of market-building and deepening that entwine women and their households ever closer into the structures of the capitalist economy', showing how 'state gender and competitiveness agendas came to be aligned with a liberal market-oriented feminism organised around the interests of elite women' (84). The focus is on the 'flagship issue' of achieving a target of 30 per cent female membership of corporate boards, launched in 2011, against a background of female representation in parliament and in government ministries then at around only 10 per cent. It has since risen slightly. The target of 30 per cent female representation by 2016 (subsequently pushed back to 2020), supported by training and a register of available candidates, was promoted by government and agencies such as LeadWomen, whose glossy website is strongly 'Western corporate' in appearance, but is 'progressive' within liberal corporatist limits: it is currently advertising a July conference on the theme of sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace, under the slogan It's Not OK! The campaign was pushed forward by a narrow coalition of governmental and corporate elite leaders, including high profile women in each, but progress was slow - Elias reports a figure of 16.9 per cent female representation for 2016 (92); the July 2019 LeadWomen Newsletter gives figures of 26.5 per cent for the top 100 corporations, and 16.2 per cent for all PLCs.
It is clearly established, then, that Malaysian policy towards gender equality is very narrowly focused on middle class women, and specifically on the professional business elite and potential entrants to it. With average per capita GDP per annum comfortably over US$10,000 and three quarters of the population of 32 million living in urban areas, the urban middle class is politically and economically significant. And as Elias details in the final substantive chapter, its lifestyle depends heavily upon the ready availability of domestic servants, for the most part migrants from Indonesia, the Philippines, and to a small extent Cambodia: 'For working women with caring responsibilities seeking to access the higher echelons of the labour market, employment of a migrant domestic worker is often seen as the only viable care option' (99). Although the model is under some threat as costs rise and numbers fall (Choong and Tan, 2018), it was of central importance throughout the whole period covered here. Summarising a wider literature to which she has herself contributed substantially, Elias notes that the local class-specific care regime in Malaysia 'has been produced via transnational migration infrastructures and governance practices that enable the movement of women from the region's poorer to richer states', while 'labour-sending states are dependent on the remittance-sending abilities of workers in Malaysia and other higher-income states in order to alleviate poverty and generate foreign exchange' (101). Malaysia's gender/competitiveness regime, that is to say, is embedded in a wider regional political economy that is itself highly gendered and class-structured (110-15). In short, the efforts of Malaysian policymakers to 'increase economic competitiveness by shifting away from a male breadwinner norm' have taken a specific form that in the absence of a developed system of social welfare protection relies heavily on migrant domestic workers.
It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the policies Elias analyses can be entirely explained in terms of the pursuit of competitiveness, and the building of strategic political alliances, without any shred of feminism, liberal or otherwise, in evidence. It is precisely the fact that these policies are so clearly instrumental that makes the case one worth noting. So Elias is right to argue that the focus on women's economic empowerment 'can lead to an effective neglect of a wider range of women's policy agendas and may even be deployed in ways that detract attention away from ingrained patriarchal privileges that operate within political, economic and legal systems' (2). However, she goes further, to challenge the view, embraced by the Malaysian authorities, that as Sydney Calkin puts it in her critique of the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report, Gender Equality and Development, women 'constitute a reserve of "untapped" human capital' (Calkin, 2017: 612). For Calkin, 'the contention that women are currently unproductive resources perpetuates the invisibility of social reproductive labour' (ibid; 614), and Elias applies this critique to the Malaysian case:
'the formulation of seeing women as an "untapped" resource needs to be challenged for a number of reasons. First, in positioning women's labour as underutilised, it exhibits a productivist bias that fails to see the essential, unpaid, work of social reproduction undertaken by so many women. Second, it fails to recognise the very different terms on which different groups of women enter the market economy (that is, how gender discrimination interacts with racial and classed structures of oppression), as well as the classed and racialised "knock-on effects" of women's economic engagement. Hence the relative ease with which middle-class educated women are able to enter the market economy is itself dependent upon an outsourcing of domestic labour to a feminised servant class. Finally, it is a formulation that draws upon ideas of women's empowerment as something that can only be attained through engagement in the productive/formal market economy, thus limiting the scope of women's political struggles' (5).
As summarised later, then, Elias argues that the 'marketisation' of gender by Malaysian state authorities reflects 'a profoundly limited understanding of gender, one that fails to fully recognise the significance of women's roles in relation to social reproduction or their claims as rights-bearing subjects' (45). I would put it slightly differently. It has adopted and pursued a conscious project that constructs gender in a profoundly limited way; it has consistently promoted the recruitment into the labour market of professional middle-class women, while exerting itself to secure a steady flow of substantially rightless domestic servants from overseas, and it has construed the rights of Malaysian women in narrow economic terms. All of this Elias sets out with perfect clarity, as the above summary shows. So it does certainly exhibit a productivist bias, but it does not 'fail to see the essential, unpaid, work of social reproduction'; it not only recognises the 'very different terms on which different groups of women enter the market economy', but actively promotes them; and if it 'draws upon ideas of women's empowerment as something that can only be attained through engagement in the productive/formal market economy, thus limiting the scope of women's political struggles', it does so consciously - following Calkin, it positively intends to change the subjectivity of women, promoting a range of biopolitical interventions to instill market mentalities and shape market-compatible subjectivities' and 'to transform women into productive (and docile) economic actors from whom profits can be extracted' (ibid: 612, 615-6). In this effort it is fully in line with the 'Smart Economics' strategy of the World Bank, with its aim to 'transform women into consumers, investors and producers for global markets'' (625). The Malaysian strategy emerges as a thoroughly gendered and racialised class strategy, perfectly aligned with World Bank doctrine, and one that has been pursued consistently since the early 1990s - witness not only the recruitment of a rightless underclass from abroad, but also the early abandonment of the 'social reproductivist' strategy aimed at more than doubling the population, and the careful construction of a political strategy that co-opts and mobilises highly educated elite professional women from Muslim as well as non-Muslim sectors of the population, cementing the bumiputera core of the governing alliance, and neutralising the potential of more radical Islamic mobilisation at the same time. Not least, following the centralising managerial executive style of Blair and others, responsibility for delivering the strategy has been placed with a unit, PEMANDU, created for the purpose, with the result - highly satisfactory from the executive point of view - that few ripples have been caused either through the government machinery or the wider society. Unreconstructed traditionalists have been accommodated rather than ousted, as reflected in the startling mis-step on the part of the Women's Ministry in response to the Covid-19 lockdown. So this incident actually tells you more about the character of the strategy than at first might be supposed – and in fact the evidence of ‘pushbacks and conflicts’ is perhaps less than Elias suggests at the outset.
What lies ahead, then, for the Malaysian model? When Elias turns briefly to comparative discussion, she identifies a crucial contrast with parallel strategies in the 'West':
'In Malaysia, we can see how there is a desire amongst economic policymakers to increase economic competitiveness by shifting away from a male breadwinner norm. This is, of course, a process that has been analysed in the Western welfare state context in terms of analyses of the impact of neoliberal reform agendas on systems of social protection (i.e. the rise of an "adult worker model" ..., which is tied to an understanding of the citizen as worker and the redesign of social security systems around the potential of every adult to engage in the labour market). In Malaysia, the very limited nature of social welfare protection means that the desired shift towards a norm of universal workforce participation has been framed very differently, as pertaining to getting a "return on investment" from women's education and boosting economic productivity more broadly' (115).
Yes, up to this point. But at the very same time that the World Bank was producing Gender Equity and Development, the European Commission was focused on the problem of 'low work intensity households', with ‘persons not employed and fulfilling domestic tasks, such as care for children or other dependants’ identified as a significant group that could be mobilised for incorporation into the labour market (European Commission, 2011: 121). Shortly thereafter it commissioned the World Bank to make a study of a group of mostly Central and Eastern European member states, to identify patterns of 'worklessness', and later extended the focus, this time in conjunction with the OECD, to the issue of 'underemployment' (or, the prospects for 'tapping' the labour of various unemployed or under-employed groups, 'inactive women' among them). The first initiative led to an edited collection entitled Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion (Sundaram, 2014). The second led to a series of working papers inaugurated by an overview study, 'Faces of Joblessness' (Fernandez, 2016), and followed by a clutch of country case studies. In no time at all, the World Bank set its sights on the unemployed and the under-employed in the developing world, and brought forward proposals in its World Development Reports of 2019, The Changing Nature of Work, and 2020, Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains, for the introduction of systems of social protection based on the new norms emerging in the advanced economies, and specifically intended to move developing states away from reliance on large informal sectors, and relatively low levels of women's employment in the formal sector. In other words, it is actively canvassing a global social protection regime that would still depend heavily on a global army of minimally protected domestic and care workers, but at the same time would aim in the longer term to raise the percentage of women of working age in formal employment (relatively high in Malaysia in regional terms, but still low in global terms) towards the mark of 80 per cent or more. So while Elias is absolutely right to highlight 'the incompatibility of an adult worker model with a familial system of social provisioning' (115), it is an open question which of the two will prevail in the longer term.
References
Calkin, Sydney. 2015. '"Tapping" Women for Post-Crisis capitalism: Evidence from the 2012 World Development Report', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17, 4, 611-629.
Choong, Christopher Weng Wai and Tan Theng Theng. 2018. The Unsung Labour: Care Migration in Malaysia, Discussion Paper 1/18, Khazanah Institute.
Crinis, Vicki, and Alifa Bandali. 2017. 'Malaysia: Balancing Paid and Unpaid Work', in Marian Baird, Michele Ford and Elizabeth Hill, eds, Women, Work and Care in the Asia Pacific, Routledge, 41-54.
European Commission. 2011. Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2011. Brussels.
Fernandez, Rodrigo et al. 2016. 'Faces of Joblessness: Characterising Employment Barriers to Inform Policy', OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 192.
Sundaram, Ramya et al. 2014. Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion. World Bank.
The first substantive chapter provides an overview of the pursuit of competitiveness in Malaysia, where the state has sought consistently over recent decades to 'climb the ladder' of development and transform the position of the country in the global economy. The second addresses the effort to transform women's economic participation, which has been an integral part of the strategy. The third examines the wider social and cultural context in relation to the family, Islam, and the 'moral political economy of competitiveness'. The fourth details the primary focus on 'market feminism' through an account of the effort to raise the percentage of women on company boards, and the fifth looks at the sharply class-differentiated character of the resulting pattern of social reproduction. A brief conclusion then considers the comparative implications of the case.
Elias organises her analysis around three related themes. First, she notes 'widespread attachment to the idea that women's increased representation in economic and financial leadership generates wider economic benefits in terms of growth, productivity and national economic competitiveness'; second, she argues that 'a concerted focus on women's economic empowerment can lead to an effective neglect of a wider range of women's policy agendas and may even be deployed in ways that detract attention from ingrained patriarchal privileges that operate within political, economic and legal systems'; and third, she remarks that Malaysia's gender and competitiveness agenda has provoked 'pushbacks and conflicts over the appropriate role of women in Malaysian society ... both inside and outside of the state' (2-3). The story, in short, is a familiar one - 'how efforts to promote gender equality have been co-opted into state efforts to deliver national economic competitiveness' (4). Elias sets the narrow politics of instrumental feminism in a broader context, considering 'how a concern with national economic competitiveness ... intersects with a gendered politics of nationalism in which women are viewed as the group in society that serves to reproduce, parent, and educate a country's "human capital"' (5). In doing so, she usefully extends a literature that, as she notes (8), has focused mainly on leading international organisations and the corporate sector.
The account of the promotion of competitiveness in Malaysia starts from the fundamental point that it was conceived and launched with the objective of fitting Malaysia for successful integration into global 'neoliberal' circuits of capital, anchored obsessively to international benchmarks of competitiveness, and pursued through 'technocratic' strategies that sought to shield it from political contestation, in which key performance indicators and international consultants loomed large: Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who launched the 'Vision 2020' competitiveness project in 1991 during his first period in office (1981-2003) and returned to power in 2018, insisted that the goal was 'an economy that is subjected to the full discipline and rigour of market forces' (cited p. 24). This specific form of 'state-led' development ran in tandem with and also entailed potential contradictions with the state policy of support for indigenous Malay interests; it was decidedly hostile to the political organisation of the working class; and it sought in particular to bring professional women into the workforce, and to recruit women more generally into factories linked to foreign capital and located in global value chains, as part of a larger strategy to develop 'flexible, productive, skilled, and competitive workers' (31).
Against this background, Chapter Two turns to the 'very specific set of policy agendas concerning the need to build a flexible, skilled, and competitive workforce in which women are positioned as untapped resources' (40), and as noted above, goes on to explore the contradiction involved in 'viewing women's responsibilities for social reproduction only ever as a hindrance to their greater economic participation' (ibid). With rates of female labour force participation lagging in comparison to neighbouring Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, in part because of a strong tendency for highly educated professional women who left work to have children not to return to the formal sector later, the Malaysian government turned its attention particularly to these middle-class women, conceptualised as 'lost talent' (41, 53, 55). Elias addresses the broader process of development in terms of 'state transformation mediated by gender relations', in order to accentuate the centrality of latter, describing her approach as a 'feminist perspective on the internationalisation of the state' that shows how 'an ethnicised gender regime centred on the state is undergoing significant transformation under international conditions of disciplinary neoliberalism' (44). She reviews the content of successive state development plans from 1966, concentrating on the last fifteen years in particular, details the extent of direct collaboration with the World Bank and the OECD (and on a somewhat different agenda with the UNDP), and raises two concerns: first, that 'a lack of gender expertise within the state means that programmes are often partial and fail to consider how increases in women's productive economic roles need to be matched by sustained and real commitments to addressing women's social reproductive burdens', and second that 'this problem is compounded by the reification of national economic competitiveness in policy-making' (52).
This leads to a discussion of TalentCorp, a government agency initially established to lure Malaysians working abroad to return, but later 'more closely involved with the issue of women's labour force participation, running a series of programmes and projects designed to assist highly skilled women to get back into employment' (55). Elias derives from an exploration of its web portal flexworklife.my the conclusions that the women it profiles were always likely to return to work, that private sector employers are not doing much to help, and that the availability of low-paid migrant domestic workers (who can be monitored in real time over domestic CCTV) is crucial (55-6). I recommend a visit to this (English language) site. When I accessed it (30 April), I came across a profiled video in which one woman expressed particular gratitude to a sympathetic line manager who 'allowed her to leave work on time' (a concession that has real meaning in Malaysian corporate culture, but still), and there is much more of interest. Elias points out that there is little state investment in care for children up to the age of four, or corporate investment in childcare facilities, and that the issues of declining fertility and an ageing population are 'almost completely unaddressed' (57, citing Crinis and Bandali, 2017). Female entrepreneurship in the form of microenterprise development through microfinance has been strongly supported, and Malaysia's IAZAM scheme has been profiled by the World Bank as a form of 'productive welfare' (58, citing World Bank, 2014: 81). This scheme consists of a series of income generation programmes situated within the National Key Results Area aimed at raising the living standards of low-income households; others target 'aspirational' women and offer skills training and development focused on service sector activities such as digital marketing and other forms of online work. But there is little evidence of significant impact in either case. Elias concludes here, then, that the 'desire to increase women's engagement in productive work was not met by a wholesale transformation to the state welfare regime', and specifically with any 'significant shifts in the state's familial, anti-welfare model of social care provisioning (61). Chapter Two concludes, then, with the observation that 'the reification of the figure of the middle-class urban woman in state gender policymaking serves not only to uphold forms of inequality, but also to actively create the conditions through which a racialised underclass of workers is produced' (ibid): this is developed further in Chapter Five.
Chapter Three explores the way in which 'deeply gendered moral values (including religious values) are articulated within the politics of competitiveness promotion', observing that 'forms of religiosity, spirituality, and commitments to leading a moral and virtuous life have been enfolded into the politics of competitiveness promotion; serving to legitimise processes of market deepening, opening up new opportunities for marketisation, yet also providing a source of resistance entrenched in gendered notions of tradition' (64). It addresses the manner in which 'the "gender and competitiveness" agenda developed alongside commitments to maintaining the economic significance of and idealised "traditional" Malay(sian) family life rooted in adherence to various forms of religiosity, and Islam in particular' (65). The chapter provides three perspectives on these issues: the MyKasih initiative intended to expand the reach of the market economy into the everyday lives of the poor, projects aimed at 'family strengthening', and the symbolic role that women and gender roles play in Islamic politics. The composite picture that results brings out complementarities and contradictions in equal measure, and I add a brief discussion of a more recent development that highlights further some of the issues involved.
The MyKasih programme was piloted with 25 families in 2008, and claimed to have reached more than 230,000 families by 2016, backed by the state and leading corporations such as the national oil company Petronas, and HSBC. It provides food aid through cash transfers, counselling, educational bursaries, financial literacy training, and skills training programmes. Recipients of food aid make their own choice of purchases from participating retailers, and the Foundation emphasises the status of recipients as autonomous consumers. This goes along with a strong message on community, and a marked focus on women in the training programmes offered for both skills and financial literacy. The emphasis, then, is on strengthening the capacity of families to manage themselves and their finances responsibly, and eventually become solvent and productive. This complemented policies aimed at 'strengthening' families as units of social reproduction: although the 1984 New Population Policy goal of an eventual population of 70 million had quickly been abandoned (in 1992) as the already slowing fertility rate dropped sharply, a focus on reproductive roles continued: the 2010 National Plan promised programmes aimed at 'strengthening marriage and promoting equal sharing of resources, responsibilities and tasks', while celebrating women as 'the cornerstone of happy families and the essence of a successful nation' (cited p. 71). The National Population and Family Development Board (LPPKN), located in the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, is central here, with its focus on the family as a site for the building of human capital. Elias detects a deep conservatism behind the official commitment to equal roles, reflected in a 'moral agenda that presents the heteronormative family unit as a transitioning, yet essential, component of development success' (72). Against the background of moral panics over juvenile delinquency, rising divorce rates, the passing of responsibility for raising children over to migrant domestic workers, and the rise of 'commuter families' and of teen pregnancy and the abandonment of babies by unwed mothers, LPPKN programmes with links to religious organisations advised abstinence to young single women, offered 'recovery' programmes for 'same gender attraction', and strongly promoted conservative 'family values'. As Elias points out, when such programmes seek to present Islamic teachings on the family, they address the reality of the urban Malay middle classes, and counsel women on finding a balance between their working and domestic lives (an issue strongly featured in the flexworklife material cited above). So an extended statement from the vice president of Wanita ISMA is written from the perspective of 'a career woman like me', and acknowledges the difficulty of the continued duty 'to be the best mothers to [our] children' (cited p. 76). At the same time, Islamic organisations, particularly those connected to the state, have embraced the need to be supportive of the main lines of development laid down by the government: Elias concludes that 'we should view neither domesticity nor religiosity as somehow at odds with the Malaysian project of economic modernisation, but as enmeshed with in it and, in many ways a product of, the country's economic expansion' (79). Even so, there are clearly underlying tensions. For example, the tendency for middle-class professional Muslim women to give up work to care for families and pursue their religious interests is at odds with the larger project of getting such women back into the labour force once their children can access state pre-school centres.
Overall, the conclusion that the 'tethering of market life to moral prerogatives' has not been straightforward is persuasive. In part this relates to the range and diversity of Islamic and other religious organisations, by no means all of which are close to the state. In part, too, it stems from the fact that leading bureaucrats in various ministries, including the Prime Minister himself and many in the key Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, have little knowledge or awareness of gender issues, and hold strongly conservative personal opinions on the role of women (49, 69, 86). This was recently demonstrated in a story that went round the world, when the Women's Ministry itself offered the advice in March that in the circumstances arising from lockdown in response to Covid-19, women should keep their standards by wearing make-up and dressing neatly even if they are staying inside, refrain from 'nagging' their husbands if they prove inept at basic domestic tasks, and even adopt the comedy squeaky voice of the popular Japanese robo-cat Doraemon to convey corrective guidance if necessary - patronising, essentialising and infantilising all at once, and later compounding the fault by explaining that the advice was offered with the best of positive intentions, and they were sorry if some had found it insensitive (Guardian, 31 March 2020, and a host of other online sources).
Chapter Four then profiles non-state actors who have 'cultivated close relationships with the state and have provided significant support for forms of market-building and deepening that entwine women and their households ever closer into the structures of the capitalist economy', showing how 'state gender and competitiveness agendas came to be aligned with a liberal market-oriented feminism organised around the interests of elite women' (84). The focus is on the 'flagship issue' of achieving a target of 30 per cent female membership of corporate boards, launched in 2011, against a background of female representation in parliament and in government ministries then at around only 10 per cent. It has since risen slightly. The target of 30 per cent female representation by 2016 (subsequently pushed back to 2020), supported by training and a register of available candidates, was promoted by government and agencies such as LeadWomen, whose glossy website is strongly 'Western corporate' in appearance, but is 'progressive' within liberal corporatist limits: it is currently advertising a July conference on the theme of sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace, under the slogan It's Not OK! The campaign was pushed forward by a narrow coalition of governmental and corporate elite leaders, including high profile women in each, but progress was slow - Elias reports a figure of 16.9 per cent female representation for 2016 (92); the July 2019 LeadWomen Newsletter gives figures of 26.5 per cent for the top 100 corporations, and 16.2 per cent for all PLCs.
It is clearly established, then, that Malaysian policy towards gender equality is very narrowly focused on middle class women, and specifically on the professional business elite and potential entrants to it. With average per capita GDP per annum comfortably over US$10,000 and three quarters of the population of 32 million living in urban areas, the urban middle class is politically and economically significant. And as Elias details in the final substantive chapter, its lifestyle depends heavily upon the ready availability of domestic servants, for the most part migrants from Indonesia, the Philippines, and to a small extent Cambodia: 'For working women with caring responsibilities seeking to access the higher echelons of the labour market, employment of a migrant domestic worker is often seen as the only viable care option' (99). Although the model is under some threat as costs rise and numbers fall (Choong and Tan, 2018), it was of central importance throughout the whole period covered here. Summarising a wider literature to which she has herself contributed substantially, Elias notes that the local class-specific care regime in Malaysia 'has been produced via transnational migration infrastructures and governance practices that enable the movement of women from the region's poorer to richer states', while 'labour-sending states are dependent on the remittance-sending abilities of workers in Malaysia and other higher-income states in order to alleviate poverty and generate foreign exchange' (101). Malaysia's gender/competitiveness regime, that is to say, is embedded in a wider regional political economy that is itself highly gendered and class-structured (110-15). In short, the efforts of Malaysian policymakers to 'increase economic competitiveness by shifting away from a male breadwinner norm' have taken a specific form that in the absence of a developed system of social welfare protection relies heavily on migrant domestic workers.
It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the policies Elias analyses can be entirely explained in terms of the pursuit of competitiveness, and the building of strategic political alliances, without any shred of feminism, liberal or otherwise, in evidence. It is precisely the fact that these policies are so clearly instrumental that makes the case one worth noting. So Elias is right to argue that the focus on women's economic empowerment 'can lead to an effective neglect of a wider range of women's policy agendas and may even be deployed in ways that detract attention away from ingrained patriarchal privileges that operate within political, economic and legal systems' (2). However, she goes further, to challenge the view, embraced by the Malaysian authorities, that as Sydney Calkin puts it in her critique of the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report, Gender Equality and Development, women 'constitute a reserve of "untapped" human capital' (Calkin, 2017: 612). For Calkin, 'the contention that women are currently unproductive resources perpetuates the invisibility of social reproductive labour' (ibid; 614), and Elias applies this critique to the Malaysian case:
'the formulation of seeing women as an "untapped" resource needs to be challenged for a number of reasons. First, in positioning women's labour as underutilised, it exhibits a productivist bias that fails to see the essential, unpaid, work of social reproduction undertaken by so many women. Second, it fails to recognise the very different terms on which different groups of women enter the market economy (that is, how gender discrimination interacts with racial and classed structures of oppression), as well as the classed and racialised "knock-on effects" of women's economic engagement. Hence the relative ease with which middle-class educated women are able to enter the market economy is itself dependent upon an outsourcing of domestic labour to a feminised servant class. Finally, it is a formulation that draws upon ideas of women's empowerment as something that can only be attained through engagement in the productive/formal market economy, thus limiting the scope of women's political struggles' (5).
As summarised later, then, Elias argues that the 'marketisation' of gender by Malaysian state authorities reflects 'a profoundly limited understanding of gender, one that fails to fully recognise the significance of women's roles in relation to social reproduction or their claims as rights-bearing subjects' (45). I would put it slightly differently. It has adopted and pursued a conscious project that constructs gender in a profoundly limited way; it has consistently promoted the recruitment into the labour market of professional middle-class women, while exerting itself to secure a steady flow of substantially rightless domestic servants from overseas, and it has construed the rights of Malaysian women in narrow economic terms. All of this Elias sets out with perfect clarity, as the above summary shows. So it does certainly exhibit a productivist bias, but it does not 'fail to see the essential, unpaid, work of social reproduction'; it not only recognises the 'very different terms on which different groups of women enter the market economy', but actively promotes them; and if it 'draws upon ideas of women's empowerment as something that can only be attained through engagement in the productive/formal market economy, thus limiting the scope of women's political struggles', it does so consciously - following Calkin, it positively intends to change the subjectivity of women, promoting a range of biopolitical interventions to instill market mentalities and shape market-compatible subjectivities' and 'to transform women into productive (and docile) economic actors from whom profits can be extracted' (ibid: 612, 615-6). In this effort it is fully in line with the 'Smart Economics' strategy of the World Bank, with its aim to 'transform women into consumers, investors and producers for global markets'' (625). The Malaysian strategy emerges as a thoroughly gendered and racialised class strategy, perfectly aligned with World Bank doctrine, and one that has been pursued consistently since the early 1990s - witness not only the recruitment of a rightless underclass from abroad, but also the early abandonment of the 'social reproductivist' strategy aimed at more than doubling the population, and the careful construction of a political strategy that co-opts and mobilises highly educated elite professional women from Muslim as well as non-Muslim sectors of the population, cementing the bumiputera core of the governing alliance, and neutralising the potential of more radical Islamic mobilisation at the same time. Not least, following the centralising managerial executive style of Blair and others, responsibility for delivering the strategy has been placed with a unit, PEMANDU, created for the purpose, with the result - highly satisfactory from the executive point of view - that few ripples have been caused either through the government machinery or the wider society. Unreconstructed traditionalists have been accommodated rather than ousted, as reflected in the startling mis-step on the part of the Women's Ministry in response to the Covid-19 lockdown. So this incident actually tells you more about the character of the strategy than at first might be supposed – and in fact the evidence of ‘pushbacks and conflicts’ is perhaps less than Elias suggests at the outset.
What lies ahead, then, for the Malaysian model? When Elias turns briefly to comparative discussion, she identifies a crucial contrast with parallel strategies in the 'West':
'In Malaysia, we can see how there is a desire amongst economic policymakers to increase economic competitiveness by shifting away from a male breadwinner norm. This is, of course, a process that has been analysed in the Western welfare state context in terms of analyses of the impact of neoliberal reform agendas on systems of social protection (i.e. the rise of an "adult worker model" ..., which is tied to an understanding of the citizen as worker and the redesign of social security systems around the potential of every adult to engage in the labour market). In Malaysia, the very limited nature of social welfare protection means that the desired shift towards a norm of universal workforce participation has been framed very differently, as pertaining to getting a "return on investment" from women's education and boosting economic productivity more broadly' (115).
Yes, up to this point. But at the very same time that the World Bank was producing Gender Equity and Development, the European Commission was focused on the problem of 'low work intensity households', with ‘persons not employed and fulfilling domestic tasks, such as care for children or other dependants’ identified as a significant group that could be mobilised for incorporation into the labour market (European Commission, 2011: 121). Shortly thereafter it commissioned the World Bank to make a study of a group of mostly Central and Eastern European member states, to identify patterns of 'worklessness', and later extended the focus, this time in conjunction with the OECD, to the issue of 'underemployment' (or, the prospects for 'tapping' the labour of various unemployed or under-employed groups, 'inactive women' among them). The first initiative led to an edited collection entitled Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion (Sundaram, 2014). The second led to a series of working papers inaugurated by an overview study, 'Faces of Joblessness' (Fernandez, 2016), and followed by a clutch of country case studies. In no time at all, the World Bank set its sights on the unemployed and the under-employed in the developing world, and brought forward proposals in its World Development Reports of 2019, The Changing Nature of Work, and 2020, Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains, for the introduction of systems of social protection based on the new norms emerging in the advanced economies, and specifically intended to move developing states away from reliance on large informal sectors, and relatively low levels of women's employment in the formal sector. In other words, it is actively canvassing a global social protection regime that would still depend heavily on a global army of minimally protected domestic and care workers, but at the same time would aim in the longer term to raise the percentage of women of working age in formal employment (relatively high in Malaysia in regional terms, but still low in global terms) towards the mark of 80 per cent or more. So while Elias is absolutely right to highlight 'the incompatibility of an adult worker model with a familial system of social provisioning' (115), it is an open question which of the two will prevail in the longer term.
References
Calkin, Sydney. 2015. '"Tapping" Women for Post-Crisis capitalism: Evidence from the 2012 World Development Report', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17, 4, 611-629.
Choong, Christopher Weng Wai and Tan Theng Theng. 2018. The Unsung Labour: Care Migration in Malaysia, Discussion Paper 1/18, Khazanah Institute.
Crinis, Vicki, and Alifa Bandali. 2017. 'Malaysia: Balancing Paid and Unpaid Work', in Marian Baird, Michele Ford and Elizabeth Hill, eds, Women, Work and Care in the Asia Pacific, Routledge, 41-54.
European Commission. 2011. Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2011. Brussels.
Fernandez, Rodrigo et al. 2016. 'Faces of Joblessness: Characterising Employment Barriers to Inform Policy', OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 192.
Sundaram, Ramya et al. 2014. Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion. World Bank.