What Does a Woman’s Appointment as Prime Minister in Sri Lanka Teach the World About Gender Equality? 

While the United States aches for a woman to be head of state, Sri Lanka had the world’s first female prime minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, back in 1960. Women in the country, nevertheless, derived no benefit from this appointment. Despite their position as the numerical majority, representing 52 percent of the population, they face abject material conditions and a culture of deep-rooted misogyny. 

Violence, as a start, is omnipresent in their lives. Violence in trains, buses, and on roads. Violence in places of fun and recreation. Violence in places of employment. Violence in schools and universities. Violence inside homes. Violence, it is a fact, is a certainty. Women have limited recourse, resources and social support, and have to continue on, close-lipped and burdened by their trauma. Many times, their female friends and family members, the “footsoldiers of patriarchy,” continue to oppress them further. Violence not only  impacts feminine and feminized bodies, but also those that do not fit into the traditional and normative confines of masculinity. 

Women have solid health and education outcomes in Sri Lanka as a result of universal healthcare and free education, but these are not set in stone. When the economic crisis hit the country in 2022, these outcomes declined particularly in the Northern, Eastern, and Central provinces occupied by minorities (i.e. Tamil, Hillcountry Tamil, and Muslim people). 

The Gender Inequality Index 2019 ranked Sri Lanka 71st out of 189 countries. The Global Gender Gap report 2020 ranked Sri Lanka 102nd out of 153. 

Women’s Labor Force Participation

In Sri Lanka, women dominate feminized industries such as health, education, and care. They also dominate the three most important forex providers in the country: tea, apparel, and the export of domestic labor into the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Women are present in the informal sector, particularly in the agriculture, forestry and the fisheries industries. They also dominate invisible industries like the sex trade. There are only estimates about their participation in the industry but the numbers are likely to be more than reported because of the economic crisis. 

Women only occupy 32.1 percent of the formal labor force. A report in 2016 identified the obstacles on the demand side: occupational segregation, income inequality, discrimination, variability in the quality of employment, and limited entrepreneurship. A report in 2013 listed reasons such as time (i.e. care burdens and household chores), limited skills, and a lack of access to opportunities on the supply side. Women’s participation in the labor force, based on research from 2016, could be facilitated if they could access remote or part-time options, jobs located close to home, safe transport, supportive partners, reliable childcare, and better pay. 

The same research made an important observation  by identifying the importance and prioritization of motherhood in Sri Lankan society. Women’s contribution to the household, as a result, be it in the act of reproduction, care for children and elderly parents, and the chores they do should also be valued. A time-use survey in 2017 revealed that women spent 38.4 percent of their total time on the care of their household and family members. In an invisible dimension, they undertake multiple forms of labor: care labor, sexual labor, emotional labor, mental labor and hermeneutical labor. They also make inputs into their family business, their spouse’s job, and/or their children’s education. 

Research confirms that women’s unpaid labor contributes 8.6-30 percent of Sri Lanka’s GDP.

Researchers and policymakers in the country routinely call for increased labor force participation, but rarely call for the formalization of motherhood as labor. Take the “Wages for Housework” campaign started by Marxist Feminists in the 1970s as an example. Why is there such a demand for women’s participation in market labor, but a crude dismissal of their continued contribution to the GDP? 

Women’s labor force participation and union membership are also linked. While there is a lot of research on limited labor force participation, there is limited research about union membership. With the support of unions women can advocate collectively for pay, hours, retirement benefits, and occupational health and safety. Women union leaders are usually sidelined and excluded from public consultations about labor reform. Why are they denied the autonomy to mold the labor force into a more desirable space? This is particularly important as feminized labor such as care labor cannot be performed by A.I. like other more “productive” jobs in market labor, so is likely to be more in demand in the local and transnational labor markets. 

Women’s Political Participation

The claim that there is limited political participation for women in Sri Lanka is an oversimplification. Women are not present in the formal political arena (they have only 13 out of a Parliament of 225 seats), but they dominate social movements and collectives. 

Women in recent years have continued to protest for a number of demands, despite the risk it poses to their bodies, livelihoods, and families. Women protested for the increase in pay in the tea plantations. Women in the North have continued to protest the enforced disappearance of family members in the Mothers of the Disappeared. Women in the North-East protested predatory micro-finance schemes and unjust debt in 2021. Women protested in the Batticaloa Justice Walk. Women from the Muslim community have protested the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA). Women in the Free Trade Zones have continued to mobilize for better pay and improved conditions. Women in the LGBTQ+ movement have pushed for decriminalization of Section 365 and 365 A and exposed the intensity of police brutality. 

Nevertheless, historically their resistance in the country is either sidestepped or brutally crushed. Premavathi Manamperi, accused of being a Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) sympathizer, was arrested, tortured and buried alive in 1971. Similarly, former TV broadcaster and journalist Isaipriya (Shobana Dharmaraja) was assaulted, tortured, and murdered by the armed forces in 2009. A similar fate befell a number of female LTTE cadres who stood up for their self-determination and the collective liberation of the Tamil people in the North-East. 

Women in Colombo’s “Gota Go Gama” protest village in 2022 experienced violence on May 9, July 9, and August 12 (the final day of the movement). Many have been haunted by intimidation, harassment, and arrests since then. The presence of repressive bills such as the Anti-Terrorism Act and Online Safety Bill in 2023 have tried to limit their dissent further. 

These actions of state-sponsored violence are mimicked by individuals in reality and on social media. Recently, a reputed male scholar leveled sexist criticisms about a member of the PWC, questioning her educational qualifications and her doctoral specialization in Gender Studies, in order to humiliate and demean her. 

Women are politically active, but the state and the political elite have crushed their resistance and their entrance into the parliamentary arena. This, rather than their numerical participation in Parliament, is the problem. 

Amarasuriya: A New Type of Woman Prime Minister

Sri Lanka’s first woman prime minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, never had to rely on, rally, or appease others like her. Cushioned by her caste and class status, she only had to act as a stand-in for her dead husband – a role her daughter, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (CBK), technically inherited and never democratized to others. 

It is in this context that the appointment of Dr Harini Amarasuriya as the prime minister of Sri Lanka is important. Unlike Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga before her, Amarasuirya is neither the widow of a famed politician nor was she born into a political dynasty. 

Amarasuriya, born in Galle, studied at Bishops College in Colombo. As a result of the JVP insurrection in the South and the Civil War in the North, she relocated from the University of Kelaniya to the University of Delhi for her undergraduate studies. She then spent a number of years in non-government organizations and civil society organizations in Colombo (such as NEST), before receiving her masters from the University of Macquarie and a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, entering academia in 2011. As a lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka, Amarasuriya joined the Federation of Teachers Union (FUTA) and spoke about the patriarchal tendencies of union members. 

In the midst of the Rajapaksa-era terror in 2011-2012, she joined a three-month strike led by the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) unions to protest the attack on retirement funds. Here, she met members of the JVP, sympathetic to causes she championed. After the disappointment of the yahapalanaya (Good Governance Government) in 2015, Amarasuriya’s involvement in the JVP deepened. 

In 2019, the JVP and other political parties reformed under the coalition National People’s Power (NPP). The Progressive Women’s Collective (PWC) was co-founded by Amarasuriya in 2019. She entered the parliament in 2020 from the National List and acted as a critical voice to the deeply unpopular President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe. 

While she is upper middle class, Amarasuriya’s meteoric political rise is linked to her participation in trade union action and political movements. Her political journey, a near impossibility in a mock-democracy like Sri Lanka, is the result of collective mobilization rather than individual privilege or individual achievement. She spoke about unpaid care labor in her maiden speech in Parliament and has routinely advocated for the participants and recipients of the care industry. 

Sri Lanka’s previous women leaders failed to move the needle much on gender issues for the masses. But women’s equality can be set into motion if revolutionary forces are left to flourish. It is only then that the structural and institutional barriers that prevent their self-actualization and collective-emancipation can be realized.