Feto bele: contemporary perceptions and expectations of women’s political leadership in Timor-Leste

ABSTRACT

This article explains how the face of political leadership in contemporary Timor-Leste is predominantly male, revealing the logics behind the preference for men. While an overwhelming majority of our survey respondents and focus group participants believed that women and men are equal and that feto bele, “women can” become political leaders, reservations about women’s attributes and capabilities were common. While women were generally perceived to have most of the important innate characteristics necessary for political leadership, such as intelligence and honesty, survey respondents and focus group participants consistently perceived that women do not have the skills, abilities, or experience to lead. These perceptions conformed to cultural gender stereotypes, creating an unconscious bias or “incongruent prejudice” against women leaders. Better appreciated were the structural barriers that women face, such as their substantial domestic burden, lesser access to financial resources, and cultural expectations. Women leaders face near-impossible expectations to also be the primary family caregivers and to run households, while male leaders do not. Furthermore, women leaders are expected to remain “feminine” – humble, calm, and caring – within an aggressively masculine political environment. To overcome these barriers to leadership, transformative change led by local actors is required, including increased awareness of gender stereotypes, structural and unconscious bias, and the harmful consequences for democracy of lack of diversity, along with some practical changes to electoral processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s political leadership
• Timor-Leste
• gender and development
• gender stereotypes
• incongruent prejudice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The multi-country research project included Timor-Leste, Cambodia, and the Solomon Islands, as well as a 2014 study in Fiji. The project was funded through the Funding Leadership Opportunities for Women (FLOW) program of the Government of the Netherlands and implemented by the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) Women’s Action for Voice and Empowerment (WAVE) program in partnership with local organizations. In Timor-Leste, the local partner was the Alola Foundation (or Alola for short). This article is based on a large dataset collected by the authors and research team in 2018 and 2019 (Niner et al. 2021) and published in a final research report titled Public Perceptions of Women’s Political Leadership in Timor-Leste (Alola Foundation and IWDA 2020). The final research report of the overall project was titled Public Perceptions of Women as Political Leaders: A Multi-Country Study (IWDA 2019).

2 This includes 12 municipalities and the Special Administrative Region of Oecusse Ambeno. As of January 2022, there were 14 municipalities, including Atauro Island, within the Dili Municipality.

3 Further figures are available in Alola Foundation and IWDA (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Niner

Sara Niner is a deeply engaged interdisciplinary academic with a personal commitment to social justice. She is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. As a critical development studies scholar, she has undertaken primary field research in developing-country contexts, particularly in the new nation of Timor-Leste. Her innovative research with local and international NGOs has brought new knowledge and policy advancement to the sector. As a regional gender expert, she has analyzed and reported on gender issues in Southeast Asia for local and international development agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UN Women, Oxfam, and the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA). Prior to becoming a critical development scholar, she spent a decade working with the East Timorese diaspora in Australia, followed by many years working and researching in Timor-Leste after the nation became independent post-1999.

Therese Nguyen Thi Phuong Tam

Therese Nguyen Thi Phuong Tam is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Science at the National University of Timor-Leste (UNTL), Timor-Leste. She is the Director of the Masters of Community Development program. Her research interests include gender and development, and in this field she has published research on social norms in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), women’s engagement with agricultural and cooking technology, reproductive health, political participation and leadership, academic women’s mobility, and elderly women’s rights in Timor-Leste. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she wrote about the limitations of information technology in learning and teaching in Timor-Leste, which helped to raise awareness about how the pandemic affected many students endeavoring to cope with the crisis situation.

Emily Morrison

Emily Morrison is the founder and director of the local development organization Sustainable Solutions Timor-Leste, which focuses on gender, community, and socially inclusive approaches. The organization works with human rights and strengths-based frameworks to foster significant, sustainable change at community and organizational levels. She has over 20 years of experience in Australia and internationally, specializing in supporting and strengthening institutions and grassroots organizations to adopt long-term solutions to development challenges and improving community engagement strategies. Building on this experience, she also engages in policy and organizational development.

Maria Evelina Iman

Maria Evelina Iman was born in Nusa Tenggara Timor in Indonesia but has lived and worked most of her life in Timor-Leste. For almost 25 years, she has been continuously engaged in activism, human rights advocacy, and community development-related work. She has led the Alola Foundation’s Advocacy team for over eight years, focusing on human rights, women’s empowerment, gender equality, and women’s leadership, and managing staff and volunteers based both in the Dili office and in the municipalities. She is passionate about preventing and responding to violence against women and children and views women’s leadership as an integral element of working towards gender equality. She is an accomplished program manager, advocate, facilitator, and trainer and strongly believes in ensuring that community voices are heard in national-level discussions and policy making. She has a Bachelor of Agriculture degree from Tribhuwana University, Indonesia.