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Chief of party, WE Act project<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
118 minutes a day<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The ILO found that 91.3 percent of unpaid care responsibilities was carried out by women. The usual tropes of female subservience \u2013 cooking, cleaning, childcare \u2013 eat up 188 minutes of a woman\u2019s day in Cambodia, compared with just 18 minutes of a man\u2019s.<\/p>\n For Loem, the issue is entrenched in Cambodian culture \u2013 which systematically devalues girls and women, leaving them less able to compete with their male counterparts in education, experience and skills.<\/p>\n \u201cSchool is more useful for boys than for girls,\u201d is one of the many teachings of Chbab Srey, the cultural cornerstone that has shaped Cambodia\u2019s attitude towards women for centuries. Along with equating being submissive and obedient to being a good wife, Chbab Srey further details doctrines prescribed to girls from an early age \u2013 doctrines that have long held back the development of women as skilled professionals.<\/p>\n Written in the 19th Century by King Ang Doung, Chbab Srey takes the form of a poem that instructs women on how to be pure and live up to archaic cultural ideals \u2013 it is a warped notion of purity that has left so many Khmer women behind, marring Cambodia\u2019s economic development in the process.<\/p>\n \u201cCambodians continue to view it as a moral set of rules \u2013 more importantly, it was part of the national curriculum until 2007, so this is what they learned at school,\u201d notes Sabine Joukes, a prominent gender equality advocate and chief of party at the WE Act project.<\/p>\n WE Act \u2013 \u201cWomen Entrepreneurs\u201d Act \u2013 launched in\u00a0 March this year, marking the beginning of a five-year project managed by international NGO PACT and funded by USAID, which gave $10 million to ensure the project improves management skills, financial literacy and business acumen among women in the Kingdom.<\/p>\n Education: key to opportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Despite having seen an enormous amount of change since first arriving in Cambodia in 1996, where Joukes recalls almost anyone with any level of education was a man, she says there\u2019s still much to be done and cites a 2013 UN survey that found 95 percent of Cambodians still believed a woman must obey her husband.<\/p>\n \u201cToday more women get a better education. We\u2019re starting to see women in higher positions and our project is focusing on empowering women entrepreneurs, even the fact that there is a big group of women entrepreneurs, and not only your typical traditional home-based entrepreneurs, but also real women who have made it even in the international markets with the export of some products,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The story of how it came to this will be all too familiar to anyone with eyes in their heads. Girls in Cambodia typically receive less schooling \u2013 an average of 3.8 years for women versus 5.6 years for men, according to the ILO.<\/p>\n Dropout rates are higher among females, chiefly on account of early-age indoctrination \u2013 Chbab Srey imposes on women a belief that they must sacrifice their future, their education and ambition should the needs of the family demand it. Young girls working in garment factories to pay for their brother\u2019s education is not uncommon \u2013 boys are simply a better economic bet for many Cambodian families.<\/p>\n \u201cOften when girls drop out, it\u2019s because their family cannot support them and girls often volunteer themselves \u2013 sometimes their parents must migrate to find work and so there is nobody to take care of the family. Usually the eldest girl will drop out to raise her brothers and sisters and so after that they don\u2019t have the skills they need to develop further, so you can see how it becomes a big problem,\u201d explains Loem.<\/p>\n USAID recorded 11.9 percent of girls dropping out of primary school in 2011, compared with just 3.23 percent of boys. However the consensus among the women familiar with the subject\u00a0 interviewed by Capital Cambodia is that this is improving.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a trend, I think, that more and more people are being educated to a higher level. They\u2019re getting training in the workplace. They have the people to coach them. We read a lot of news. We watch TV \u2013 everything is becoming more accessible here, especially information,\u201d says Kim Hoan Pheng, managing director of Two Way Public Relations \u2013 one of the more prominent women-led businesses in Cambodia.<\/p>\n Pheng\u2019s career has taken her around the world. She was responsible for organising the 2012 Asean Forum in Cambodia, has met former US president Barack Obama and now runs a highly successful PR agency here in Phnom Penh. She feels more is being done now to foster innovation and success among women.<\/p>\n \u201cThese days, I join a lot of working groups for women \u2013 entrepreneurship forums \u2013 so I see a lot of women out there that are that are even more successful than me. I learned from them and I encourage the women starting out. I think more women are demonstrating their entrepreneurship,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Climbing the career ladder<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The data is starting to tell a similar story, with the World Bank noting that the female share of senior and middle management jumped from a measly 16.7 percent in 2012, to 33.1 percent in 2016.<\/p>\n The World Economic Forum\u2019s figures back this up. Where 1 is perfect equality and 0 is total imbalance, the level of gender equality among professional and technical workers in 2017 was recorded at 0.573 which then shot up to 0.746 in 2018.<\/p>\n Chea Renou is one such entrepreneur who, when faced with a personal crisis, gave up a career in accounting to take care of her family. Out of financial hardship, Moto Girl Tours was born \u2013 offering tourists an insightful voyage around Cambodia while perched on the back of a motorbike. The unique selling point is that all the drivers are women and speak good English.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s important to show that not only can women be tour guides, but also drivers,\u201d explains Chea, who notes that there is often prejudice against female drivers and points to the lack of women working as taxi drivers as evidence.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they have work and get their own income, they can be confident and independent,\u201d she says, hoping that Moto Girl Tours will offer more women the chance to take charge of their own finances through flexible employment.<\/p>\n Chea notes that there has been change over time, with many of her initial customers being foreign men \u2013 in part perhaps because of their marketing strategy that focuses on the youth and beauty of Moto Girl Tours guides. Now, she says, they are appealing more to female travellers.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been almost four years, but of course we have been through some difficult times. Sometimes we have been looked down on by people who see us taking foreigners around and sometimes customers treat us not so nicely, but only a few of them,\u201d Chea explains.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Breaking down the barriers<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The barriers that once kept women confined to Cambodia\u2019s kitchens are slowly coming down and the opportunities for women in the workplace are opening up, but progress is \u2013 as progress so often is \u2013 limited mostly to the cities.<\/p>\n The playing field is not yet level, with the ILO estimating a 20 percent net wage gap between men and women in Cambodia. This, coupled with their concern over the 57 percent of women who are in what the ILO calls \u201cvulnerable employment\u201d\u00a0 highlights the need for a business case to be made for women-focused policies.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the big challenges that we continuously hear is that women are not part of the business associations. Because the associations are mostly male, they meet in the evening and that\u2019s where alcohol is consumed \u2013 so it\u2019s already three things that don\u2019t go very well with being a woman here,\u201d laments Joukes, whose WE Act programme aims to give women the networking opportunities they have so far been denied.<\/p>\n The issue, she argues, is that even if education were improved, if economic opportunities were more plentiful and the social norms of Chbab Srey cast off into the annals of history, there is still a need to develop policy with women\u2019s needs at the heart of it, because these differ wildly from the needs of men.<\/p>\n Stay positive, look long-term<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cAt all levels of the workforce and also with entrepreneurs, apart from your pure capacity and skill-building, in terms of business skills that you can apply to your business, it also affects, for example, things like your access to information, your confidence in approaching governance about your registration or your taxation etc.\u201d she notes.<\/p>\n In 2018, the McKinsey Global Institute highlighted the value of gender equality in economic terms, with Asia and the Pacific being able to add $4.5 trillion to annual gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025, or 12 percent above business as usual, should it implement gender equality policies effectively. Cambodia, the study found, stands to gain $4 billion by 2025 if it follows suit.<\/p>\n For Joukes and Loem, there is a challenge in finding a balance between the approaches taken. The question of whether Cambodian women can trust in the Hun Sen administration to effectively implement gender-sensitive legislation is one worth asking.<\/p>\n WE Act has spent time and energy to establish how best to go about leveraging change, mapping out the various levers of power and how best they can be operated in order to achieve a better, fairer world for women.<\/p>\n \u201cAre we going to put our effort and attention into female policies that may sound nice, but fail on implementation? Where this really becomes sticky is those informal taxations, which makes for unfair competition because more women run smaller businesses, they are more affected by those things,\u201d says Joukes in reference to issues regarding payments to predominantly male-dominated law enforcement that enable women to run informal businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see wonderful, absolutely stunning examples of really empowered young women who break all of what I\u2019ve just said, who really go to the opposite side and who have supportive families and come up with great innovative ideas. They will be our beacons of light. Little by little, we will have more and more of those and that is what we need to support and nurture them,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n SHE Investments has just taken on 60 new entrepreneurs \u2013 all of them women, all of them eager to prove themselves capable of competing with men.<\/p>\n Loem explains that they came from across the country, to embark on incubator and accelerator programmes with SHE Investments, who will provide access to networks, finance and guidance to get these fledgling businesses off the ground.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we started SHE, we found that women owned more than 65 percent of all businesses in Cambodia, whereas men ran just 35 percent, but the income is split with 60 percent going to men and only 40 percent to women. I ask myself why is it like that? And I can see the problem \u2013 the knowledge, the experience, themselves; women just don\u2019t get the opportunity to take those things as seriously as men.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Slow progress on gender equality \u2018will cost Kingdom in the long-run\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3010,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[38,93,669],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/capitalcambodia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/MotogirlTour-f.jpg\")
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