BORN INTO PRECARITY: WHY YOUNG WOMEN IN ASIA PACIFIC ARE INHERITING A BROKEN LABOUR MARKET
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Part 3 of the “Who Is This Crisis For?” Series — SocDem Asia Pacific
Sondang Tarida Tampubolon is the Coordinator of Social Democrats Asia Pacific (SocDem Asia Pacific) and Deputy Secretary-General of the National Democratic Party (Partai NasDem), Indonesia.
This article is part of the SocDem Asia Pacific editorial series leading up to the webinar “Regional Solidarity in Times of Crisis” in August 2026.
Introduction
Across Asia and the Pacific, a generation of young women is entering the labour market under conditions that are structurally and systematically unfair. They are the most educated generation of women the region has ever seen, yet they are disproportionately excluded from decent work, social protection, and meaningful economic security.[1][2]
They are not failing the labour market. The labour market is failing them.
This pattern is not exceptional. Across the region, highly educated young women routinely enter employment under short-term rolling contracts — often of three months’ duration — with gaps between contracts that are too brief to qualify for unemployment support yet long enough to erode economic stability. Many hold positions without employer-provided health insurance, paid sick leave, or pension contributions. The credentials they earned did not translate into the labour protections they were led to expect.
These workers are not unemployed, unskilled, or unmotivated. They are precarious — employed in forms of work that strip away the protections associated with standard employment while demanding the same commitment and performance. This is not a marginal phenomenon.[3]
In Part 2 of this series, we examined the women who sustain Asia Pacific’s economies through informal and unpaid labour — market vendors, home-based workers, and caregivers whose contributions remain invisible in official accounts. This article examines the generation that followed: young women who entered the labour market expecting that higher educational attainment would secure better outcomes, and who are confronting the gap between that expectation and structural reality.[3]
The Education Paradox
Over the past three decades, gender gaps in education across Asia and the Pacific have narrowed substantially. In many countries, young women now match or even outperform young men at secondary and tertiary levels, and global datasets show dramatic increases in women’s higher-level educational attainment in the region. By the metrics development institutions like to celebrate — enrolment, literacy, graduation — this looks like a success story.[2][1]
Yet labour market outcomes tell a different story. Young women in Asia Pacific face higher unemployment rates than young men with similar education levels, particularly in Southern Asia where the unemployment rate of highly educated young women can be roughly double that of their male peers. They are more likely to be “NEET” — not in employment, education, or training — and in some subregions, young women make up nearly three-quarters of all NEET youth.[4][1][2]
This is the education paradox: young women are investing more in their human capital than ever before, but receiving a lower return on that investment in the labour market. It is not a paradox of individual failure; it is a paradox produced by structural design.[1][3]
How Precarity Feels from the Inside
Policy debates often frame youth employment through indicators: unemployment rates, labour force participation, skills gaps. These numbers matter, but they do not fully convey what it feels like to live on a series of short-term contracts, in an informal job without rights, or in a platform-based “gig” with no safety net.[2][3]
For young women in non-standard employment — on rolling short-term contracts, in platform-based work, or in informal positions without written agreements — precarity structurally limits their capacity to plan. It constrains access to long-term credit, creates barriers to housing security, and generates justified fear that pregnancy or family obligations will lead to non-renewal of contracts, a practice formally prohibited in many jurisdictions but widely documented in practice.[3]
Precarity also has psychological costs. Being “always on,” constantly performing to avoid losing the next contract, generates stress and burnout that do not appear in standard labour force surveys. In theory, a well-functioning labour market with adequate social protection shares the risks of illness, unemployment, and downturns across society. In reality, for millions of young women in Asia Pacific, these risks are shifted almost entirely onto the individual worker.[5][2][3]
A Labour Market Built on Informality
Asia Pacific has one of the lowest official unemployment rates in the world, but this headline figure masks a far more troubling reality. More than two-thirds of workers in the region are in informal employment, with low pay, weak or nonexistent contracts, and limited rights or protections.[2]
Young people are especially exposed. Youth aged 15–24 in Asia Pacific are around five times more likely to be unemployed than adults, and about one in four youth in the region are NEET, with young women disproportionately represented in this group. In Indonesia, for example, recent research finds that nearly one in four young people are NEET, with prevalence higher among young women, rural youth, and especially rural married women.[6][4][2]
These patterns expose the inadequacy of using unemployment alone as a measure of economic inclusion. A young woman may be “employed” but still lack a written contract, earn below a living wage, and have no access to health insurance, maternity protection, or pensions. It is this combination of informality and absence of social protection that defines the contours of precarity for young women across the region.[7]
The Gig Economy’s Broken Promise
When platform work and the wider gig economy began to expand across Asia Pacific, some policymakers framed it as an opportunity for young women. Flexible hours, they argued, could allow women to combine paid work with care responsibilities, while digital platforms might reduce discriminatory gatekeeping present in traditional hiring processes.[8]
The reality has been far more complex — and often more damaging. For many young women working as ride‑hailing drivers, delivery workers, freelance digital labourers, online tutors, or content moderators, flexibility comes without protection. Classified as independent contractors, they typically lack access to social insurance, minimum wage guarantees, maternity protection, or effective mechanisms for collective bargaining.[9][8]
As institutions such as the Asian Development Bank warn of slower growth in 2026 and 2027, it is these workers who will feel the downturn first and most sharply. Platform companies rarely absorb the shock; they pass it on through lower rates, algorithmic systems that squeeze more work for less pay, and oversupply of workers competing for fewer tasks. The gig economy did not invent precarity for young women, but it has industrialised and digitised it at scale.[8][9][3][2]
The Care Penalty Starts Early
One of the least visible but most consequential dynamics shaping young women’s working lives is the care penalty — the wage and career gap that opens up because women disproportionately shoulder unpaid care responsibilities. While research often focuses on the “motherhood penalty,” for many young women in Asia Pacific this penalty begins long before they have children.[10][7][3]
Employers, especially small and medium enterprises, may factor anticipated future maternity leave or care-related absences into hiring and promotion decisions. Young women in their twenties are informally assessed not only on current performance but also on their presumed future family roles. This is discrimination, but it remains difficult to prove and is rarely sanctioned. Beyond the workplace, social norms still assign daughters and young women a disproportionate share of care — for younger siblings, ageing parents, and household management — in ways not generally expected of their male peers.[7][10][3]
The result is a generation of young women who enter the labour market already carrying an unequal care load and who are then penalised professionally and financially for carrying it.[7][3]
Documented Patterns Across the Region
Quantitative indicators capture the scale of the problem, but qualitative and case-based research reveals how these structural conditions manifest in specific employment contexts. The following patterns are documented across sectors and countries in the region:[3]
· In Cambodia’s garment sector, research has documented supervisory pressure on women workers to defer marriage and pregnancy as a condition of continued employment. This pressure operates informally and is rarely recorded in official grievance systems, making it difficult to address through standard compliance mechanisms.[7][3]
· In Malaysia’s technology sector, gender pay gap analyses and employer surveys have documented differential starting salaries offered to male and female graduates with equivalent or lower qualifications. The rationalisation that men have greater “financial commitments” remains a commonly cited justification — one that reflects gendered assumptions about economic dependency and disregards women’s equivalent or greater financial responsibilities.[1][3]
· In India’s platform-based content moderation sector, labour research has documented the exposure of workers — predominantly young women classified as independent contractors — to psychologically harmful material without access to occupational health support, paid sick leave, or institutional recognition of the emotional toll. The contractor classification is used systematically to deny access to employer-side responsibilities for worker wellbeing.[8][3]
These patterns differ in sector and country but reflect a consistent structural logic. Labour market rules across the region have, through a combination of policy design and enforcement gaps, permitted practices that systematically disadvantage young women workers while concentrating risk at the individual level.
What Needs to Change
The challenges facing young women in Asia Pacific’s labour market are structural; therefore, the solutions must also be structural. Targeted programmes — individual skills interventions, mentorship schemes, or isolated regulatory tweaks — cannot address a system that is designed to produce unequal outcomes.[3][7]
Several priorities are clear:
· End the contract trap. Laws should close loopholes that allow employers to keep workers on rolling short-term contracts for years to avoid obligations like social insurance and severance. A young woman on her fourth consecutive three‑month contract with the same employer is, in all meaningful ways, an employee and should be recognised as such in law.[5][3]
· Extend social protection to all workers. Social insurance systems — health coverage, unemployment benefits, pensions — need to be designed around people, not around outdated categories of “formal” versus “informal” employment. International social protection frameworks emphasise that coverage should extend to platform workers, own-account workers, and those in other non-standard forms of employment.[9][5]
· Treat care as essential infrastructure. Affordable, quality childcare and eldercare are not private luxuries; they are public goods and economic infrastructure. When the state underinvests in care, the cost falls on women, particularly young women trying to establish themselves in the labour market. Increasing public investment in care is an investment in productivity, equality, and growth.[10][7]
· Put young women in the room. Policies on labour markets, digital platforms, and social protection are still made largely without young women at the table. They remain underrepresented in parliaments, trade unions, policy forums, and corporate decision-making spaces across the region. This is not incidental; it is structural. Without their voices, the rules will continue to reproduce their exclusion.[10][7]
An Inheritance We Refuse to Accept
The young women entering the labour market today did not design the rules that shape their working lives. They did not choose the informalisation of work, the weakening of labour protections, or the underfunding of public care systems that push unpaid care back into households.[7][3]
The policy expectation — implicit but pervasive — is that young women will absorb the costs of this system through individual adaptation: by accepting insecure contracts, forgoing social protection, and managing care responsibilities without institutional support. From a social democratic perspective, that expectation must be rejected. Individual adaptation cannot substitute for collective protection, and personal effort cannot compensate for structurally unequal labour market rules.[3]
A generation of young women who are more educated than their predecessors, yet face lower returns on that investment and weaker labour protections, is not an indicator of progress. It is evidence of policy failure — the predictable outcome of decades of decisions that have prioritised workforce flexibility and cost-reduction over labour rights, social protection, and gender equity.[2][3]
Fixing this system requires more than incremental reforms. It demands a fundamental reorientation of what labour markets are for and whom they are meant to serve — and a renewed commitment to regional solidarity that centres young women’s rights, voices, and futures.
The next article in this series will ask a harder question: why have states in the region allowed this erosion of protection to occur, and what does it mean when governments systematically withdraw from their responsibility to protect workers — leaving women, once again, to fill the gap?[3]
Source
· International Labour Organization (ILOSTAT). “I am Generation Equality: ideals versus reality in Asia and the Pacific’s labour markets.” 2020. https://ilostat.ilo.org/blog/i-am-generation-equality-ideals-versus-reality-in-asia-and-the-pacifics-labour-markets/[1]
· UNESCO-UNEVOC. “Asia-Pacific: Key Facts & Overview.” 2022. https://atlas.unevoc.unesco.org/asia-pacific[2]
· UNESCO Bangkok, ILO, UNICEF. “Youth not in employment, education or training (NEET) in South Asia.” 2023. https://www.unesco.org/sdg4education2030/en/articles/webinar-youth-not-employment-education-or-training-neet-south-asia[4]
· World Bank Open Data. “Share of youth not in education, employment or training, female (% of female youth population) – East Asia & Pacific.” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.NEET.FE.ZS?locations=Z4[11]
· World Bank Open Data / ILOEST. “Share of youth not in education, employment or training, female – East Asia & Pacific (excluding high income).” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.NEET.FE.ME.ZS?locations=4E[12]
· Asian Development Bank. “Where Women Work in Asia and the Pacific: Implications for Policies, Equity, and Inclusive Growth.” 2022. https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/916051/where-women-work-asia-pacific.pdf[7]
· APEC Policy Support Unit. “Unpacking Issues in the Gig Economy: Policy Approaches to Empower Women in APEC.” 2024. https://www.apec.org/publications/2024/01/unpacking-issues-in-the-gig-economy-policy-approaches-to-empower-women-in-apec[8]
· ASEAN Secretariat. “Gig Economy, Rural Urban Mobility, and Poverty in the ASEAN Region.” 2025. https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/ASCC-RD_Trend-Report_PA19-2025.pdf[9]
· ILO. “World Social Protection Report” (flagship report). https://www.social-protection.org/gimi/RessourceDownload.action?id=58755[5]
· ESCAP. “Youth unemployment in Asia-Pacific” factsheet (based on 2011 Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific). https://repository.unescap.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/cd13e370-1895-4e46-8289-980f6541228f/content[13]
· Asia-Pacific Regional Report on Beijing+30 Review. “Charting New Paths for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.” ESCAP, 2024. [summary PDF link on ESCAP site][10]
· Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) Among the Youth in Indonesia. Universitas Indonesia, 2024. https://scholar.ui.ac.id/en/publications/not-in-employment-education-or-training-neet-among-the-youth-in-i[6]
Links
3. 25-June-Born-Into-Precarity-Why-Young-Women-in-Asia-Pacific-Are-Inheriting-a-Broken-Labour-Mark.docx
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