Trade Win No. 3
UNLOCKING ASEAN’S TALENT | Rebecca Fatima Sta Maria
On a humid morning in Kuala Lumpur, Aminah sets up her roadside food stall. Her business is informal—unregistered, untaxed, and unprotected. She works long hours but cannot access loans or government support.
Across ASEAN, women face similar constraints. In rural Sabah, Malaysia, a woman artisan recounted the challenges of selling products online: poor road access, costly logistics, weak internet connectivity, and limited digital skills, all compounded by expectations that she balances entrepreneurship with domestic responsibilities.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Chan, a trade minister in an ASEAN member state, has spent 24 years advancing her country’s trade agenda globally. Yet she notes that she is still expected to “keep her household in order.”
These stories illustrate a common reality across ASEAN: regardless of where women live or the positions they hold, many face similar barriers to participating fully in trade and services. Unpaid care responsibilities, limited access to formal economic systems, and persistent social norms constrain women’s economic opportunities.
These stories point to a simple but important lesson: trade is not gender-neutral. While trade policies may appear gender-blind, women and men often experience their effects differently because of existing structural barriers and social norms.
Women are disproportionately employed in services—the sector that has generated jobs for women faster than for men in many economies. This makes services trade a powerful channel for advancing women’s economic empowerment in ASEAN, provided policymakers recognize and address its uneven effects.
Trade can also help women access higher quality jobs. In ASEAN, workers in export-oriented sectors are more likely to be formally employed and to receive benefits, training opportunities, and greater job security. For women, the probability of informal work drops from 20 percent in low-export sectors to 13 percent in high-export sectors. This correlation between export intensity and formal employment underscores the importance of integrating gender considerations into trade policy.
ASEAN has made progress on trade integration but has been slow to incorporate gender considerations into trade agreements. No member has concluded a bilateral free trade agreement with a standalone gender chapter, unlike Canada–Chile. ASEAN agreements remain largely gender-blind, reflecting the view that trade is neutral. By contrast, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership embeds language in its labor chapter requiring parties to promote employment equity, address gender-based discrimination, and tackle the wage gap.
In ASEAN, APEC, and other multilateral fora, recurring concerns include persistent gender gaps, the need for sex-disaggregated data, the economic gains from closing inequality, and the burden of unpaid care work.
Closing these gaps requires deliberate action. Trade policies must reflect how men and women experience economic opportunities differently. Meanwhile, domestic reforms should target legal constraints, labor protections, and unpaid care work. Only then can ASEAN ensure women share equally in regional integration benefits.
