by KYOKO KUSAKABE
In Brief
Thai women hold significant leadership roles in business, yet gender equality remains a persistent issue. Women-owned enterprises lack formal financing and women face a disproportionate burden of care work. Government policies support male-dominated sectors, widening disparities. With a rapidly aging society, addressing these issues is crucial for ensuring economic progress and achieving gender equity.
Women in Thailand are active in the business sphere. Thai businesses have one of the highest ratios of women CEOs in the world, with 32 per cent of senior leadership positions in Thailand held by women, compared to the global average of 27 per cent. Almost 90 per cent of businesses in Thailand have at least one woman in senior management.
But this does not mean that gender equality in Thailand has been achieved. Thailand ranks around 74th in the world on the Gender Inequality Index, which is only the fourth highest in Southeast Asia, after Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei.
Although there is government support to improve credit access for small enterprises, such as the Thai Credit Guarantee Corporation, women-owned and women-led enterprises often do not have sufficient access to formal financing. These enterprises, which are often in small scale retail and service sectors, largely rely on informal sources of finance, such as personal savings or loans from family and friends.
In general, informal employment of women in Thailand is decreasing thanks to the revisions in social security regulations that allowed self-employed women to be included in the formal social protection scheme. Although Thailand records almost no gender wage gap, this statistic can be misleading as there is still a gender wage gap when comparing individuals with the same qualifications. On average, women have a higher level of education than men, so when compared at the same education level, women are paid less.
Sex segregation in the workplace is also high. More than 70 per cent of workers in healthcare and social work are women, while only a little over 10 per cent are in construction. Younger and older women fare badly, with informal employment still high among youth (under 25) and those over 40. Even though the overall trend is decreasing, gender inequality persists for these groups of women.
Women are also disadvantaged because they are expected to take on much more care work responsibilities than men. Women spend significantly more time on childcare compared to men. Poorer women face more difficulty in doing so as they need to work longer hours to make ends meet. This unequal gender division of labour ultimately affects children’s wellbeing. The same applies for elderly care. Single and married daughters often stay with their parents or return from urban areas to look after them when they are old. Such responsibilities affect their career development.
Women’s progress in the business world has been supported by childcare provided by extended families and hired caretakers. Many urban households hire domestic workers. Before the 1990s, poor women from rural areas took on these roles. But as other employment options such as factory jobs became available, Thai women stopped working as domestic workers and cross-border migrants started to take their place.
As more families are shifting to a nuclear structure and Thailand is experiencing a shortage of domestic workers, future challenges for women may arise unless the importance of gender equality in sharing care work is realised. With Thai society aging rapidly, changes in care work responsibilities are needed to make sure that women’s position in the economy does not lag further behind in the future.
The difficulty of balancing raising children with a career is also reflected in decisions regarding the number of children married couples have. Thailand’s birth rate has been decreasing since the 1970s, dropping below the replacement rate of 2.1 in 1999 and reaching only 1.45 per woman in 2024.
The Thai government’s economic policy does not seem to be easing such tension. Not only is there no significant effort to support care work and change the gender division of labour in the household, but its economic policy also focuses largely on male-dominated industries. The government’s industrialisation policy focuses on specific industries for support, which are largely male-dominated. This means that the government’s support program will reach fewer women’s enterprises compared to men’s.
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