JAKARTA– I’m mid-way through a trip to Indonesia at the
request of the State Department, and I’m finding a hard time putting the
experience into words. You’d think after two years of writing about
other countries it’d be easy. I can’t remember if it was always this
hard, or there’s just something different about this trip.
Maybe it’s the added surreal layer that this time, I’m flying around
between seven far-flung cities in the world’s largest Muslim country
talking about the importance of more Indonesian women starting
companies.
Most people know the topic of “WHY AREN’T THERE MORE WOMEN IN SILICON
VALLEY?” isn’t my favorite. Far too often the debate degenerates into
grandstanding, whining and pointing fingers at all those evil male
gatekeepers like, you know, TechCrunch. Never mind our company is run by
a woman, our editorial group reports to another woman and more than
half our senior staff are women.
But even worse, the debate has degenerated into pure linkbait. I
rarely read anything new or thought-provoking on it. People glorify the
need to RAISE AWARENESS, but who isn’t aware? Do you have eyes, and have
you ever been to a tech conference? Then you’re plenty aware. We all
are. Still hasn’t fixed the problem.
So while a lot of the women I’m talking to are expecting the fancy US
expert to come in and tell them all how we’ve figured it out and what
they should learn from us– I’m doing the opposite. I’m telling them how
messed up it is in the world’s great meritocracy of Silicon Valley. I’m
telling them that only about 20% of tech workers are women, despite more
women graduating with math and science degrees than ever before. I’m
telling them that only 15 Fortune500 companies have woman CEOs despite
there being gender parity in terms of management jobs in the US,
according to the World Economic Forum. I’m telling them that even though
40% of small businesses are women owned, only 8% of the venture funded
startups are.
And then I’m telling them that for all the talk and handwringing
about it, the smartest people I know can’t for the life of them figure
out why that is. We have no idea why immigrants in Silicon Valley can do
so much better in our country than American women can, and we have less
of an idea how to fix it.
I tell them all the reasons people come up with and ask them if they
face those things here in Indonesia. I tell them why I think some of
those reasons are cop-outs and why some– like work-life balance– are
legitimate issues that do keep women from starting businesses. I tell
them how many professional women– me included–get trapped in feeling
like pregnancy is a disability, rather than proof of how strong we are.
And we talk about some solutions to make things better.
Most of all, I’m telling them the easiest way to break a glass
ceiling is to never create one, and urging groups to work hard to
include women in Indonesia’s burgeoning private sector and
entrepreneurial ecosystem now, while it’s just getting started.
It’s surreal for me, an American woman, to be telling audience after
audience of women dressed in traditional Muslim headscarves that we
don’t have gender equality figured out. But it’s more surreal for them
to hear it. More than a few women have told me they were shocked. That
they’d assumed women could do whatever they wanted in the US. A few have
said that after my talk, they think starting a company sounds easier in
Indonesia.
Sure, a few times a male in the audience has
gone there. One
fervently disagreed with my entire keynote saying that it was morally
wrong for women to be out of the home and that if the government did
anything to advocate this, it would be a nightmare for Indonesian
society, birth rates would go into free-fall and all hell would break
loose. It was a long diatribe, and my translator clearly gave me the
nice version of his comments. Whether it was stated or not, the
implication was there:
What the hell are you doing out of the house half way around the world, crazy American lady? What’s wrong with your husband?
Another time, a man suggested that the US statistics proved that women
shouldn’t
start businesses. Turning my argument on its head, he suggested that
the US economy doesn’t seem to be missing the participation of more
women, and that it’d clearly been a positive for us. I pointed out that
studies have shown that women-owned businesses become profitable faster
and generate more revenue, and that the US economy isn’t exactly a
global role model these days. There’s also the obvious retort– we have
no idea what the opportunity cost from more women not participating in
Silicon Valley’s economy has been. “Sorry, pal, but the facts just
aren’t on your side,” I said, and the predominantly female audience
laughed.
These are obviously viewpoints too un-PC to voice in the US, even if
many people still believe them. But when each guy made these arguments,
the women in the audience didn’t seem cowed or even too concerned. There
was definitely some knowing-looks and eye rolling exchanged.
“Oh there he goes again talking about how we need to stay in the house…” The
attitude wasn’t preventing women from attending these events or the
entrepreneurship colleges I’ve spoken at, where more than half of the
audience have typically been women.
I’ve known from my previous trips to this country that Muslim
Indonesians are very moderate and not at all like the stereotype many
Americans would expect, particularly in more cosmopolitan urban areas.
But during this trip, I’ve frequently been speaking at Muslim schools in
more remote cities. My first talk was in a school so known for
demonstrations that last week several classrooms were set on fire. And
yet, even there the women don’t fit the meek-and-submissive stereotype
as much as a few of the men would clearly like them to.
The brutality of Indonesian life– whether it’s 350 years of colonial
domination, dictators, poverty or a never-ending assault of natural
disasters– have forged these women into pure steel. Friends in the US
have remarked at how intense it is that I’m here traveling city-to-city,
lugging suitcases up and down jetway stairs in the tropical heat,
delivering keynotes for more than three hours per day. Indeed, for an
American pregnant woman, it is a pretty intense schedule. My ankles have
morphed into thick, bloated stumps. Last week a clerk at a maternity
store refused to let me carry a small bag of clothes to my car, I
haven’t washed a dirty dish or stitch of laundry since my husband found
out the news, and Paul Carr regularly takes my backpack from me when I
try to leave the TechCrunch offices every night.
And yet, I met a woman the other day who runs a company delivering
goods and services to remote villages. She has seven kids. When she was
nine-months pregnant with number seven she was loading up her motorbike
with supplies and winding around Indonesia’s crazy highways and dirt
roads to continue her work. That, ladies and gentlemen, is intense. Is
that woman going to be stopped by a man telling her she’s not strong
enough to run a company? The idea made her laugh. She was sitting in the
front row of one of my keynotes, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a
woman so confident and self-possessed. She was not only badass, she was
well aware of just how badass she was.
Unlike shrill women advocates in the US, these women don’t care
whether male gatekeepers try to keep them down; it doesn’t seem to
affect them. They shrug and go after what they want anyway. That’s
stunning because generally Indonesia is a culture that looks to the
government to solve most of their problems for them.
I spent the afternoon in Jakarta the other day with a group called
IWAPI– which translated stands for the Indonesian Businesswoman’s
Association. The woman who runs it commanded the room with intense
features, a bright red headscarf and an elaborate green silk dress.
(She’s center in the picture to the left.) Throughout the meeting she
snapped at her assistant– a man– to bring the water, fetch her bag,
bring more chairs. My male state department guide looked a little
scared. Before I could say anything she started to grill me on my
qualifications. I knew one thing immediately: I never want this woman on
my bad side.
But she uses that intensity to create opportunities for the 40,000
members of this organization that was started the year I was born. For
instance, while some entrepreneurs in the country are complaining that
new Asian trade agreements will flood the domestic market with cheaper
Chinese goods, IWAPI is organizing its own collective trade missions to
surrounding South East Asian countries, looking for new markets to
offset the risk. The woman in green told me what she tells young women
in Indonesia: The literal translation for the Bahasa word for
entrepreneur is “a person who makes things happen.” “If you want things
to be done for you, you’re not an entrepreneur,” she said. “You work for
the entrepreneur.”
Many of the women I’ve met– including those at IWAPI– appear to do a
much better job at the thing we fail at most: Women helping lift one
another up. Last week, I visited a co-op in Surabaya, where women
jointly run a hotel, a grocery store (below) and a sort of local
Indonesian street vendor food court. They pool that money– and money
from outside investors– to grant more than $1 billion rupiahs (or more
than $100,000) in
monthly microloans to their 12,000 women members. Operating well before
microloans were trendy, this co-op has been in business 30 years.
It was a hub of activity– women working at the various businesses,
women helping watch one another’s kids, women in the computer lab
learning how the Internet could help fuel their businesses, women in
line to make payments on their loans. No one is worrying too much about
work-life balance, because it’s a given many of them will have
half-a-softball-team of kids. If they want to work, those issues are
just reality. One of the many challenges of Indonesian life. One woman
(pictured at the top of the post, waiting to make her monthly loan
payment) had been a member for 20 years. She owns her own businesses and
has seven kids and was welling up in tears telling me about the impact
the co-op had made. That without it, she simply wouldn’t have been able
to start a company. With it, her business had thrived and she’d never
missed a payment.
The co-op’s board member opened my talk with a cross between a cheer and call-and-response prayer. Roughly it translated to:
How are your businesses doing?
“AWESOME!” The women yelled back raising fists in the air.
Are you paying your loans back?
“YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!” they yelled.
Are you going to default?
“NO WAY!” they yelled, together dismissing the thought physically
with an emphatic wave of their hands. As each of them told me their
stories, the women clapped at every success milestone– nevermind they’d
heard these stories all before.
Back at IWAPI, four of the women told me that not only were their
husbands supportive of their companies– they’d done so well that their
husbands had quit their jobs and were now working on the wives’
entrepreneurial dreams. Even my Indonesian state department translator
was stunned to hear it. “There are two types of IWAPI husbands,” the
uber-intense woman in green told me. “Those who are silent partners and
support their wives, and those who become actual partners in the
business.” Another woman in the group was living the harsh flipside of
this statement. Her husband left her a single mother, because she
refused to give up her fashion design company and sit at home while he
worked. Her life isn’t easy, but she has no doubt she made the right
choice.
I don’t mean to paint the picture of some gender utopia. In each
case, these were women that opted to attend a talk about
entrepreneurship, so it may not be a relative sample of the population.
And to be sure, questions come up about pressure from society to raise
kids and men not taking them seriously; the same issues women talk about
in the US. When I’ve brought up some of the issues we face, there’s a
lot of head nodding in the audience and commiserating laughter. Some of
this is just international, it seems.
But the difference among the women I’ve met so far in Indonesia is
they just don’t seem to dwell on it. They’ve got more important things
to do.
