Gorontalo, The Black Swan of Indonesia

We, Indonesian, or may be people in whole world commonly accept that there are such a gender discrimination in daily life. I'm not going to ignore that, especially from my Indonesia point of view about education.We know about great struggle of Kartini at the past against Javanese culture named "pingitan". (Women are believed to stay at home and didn't need to got education experience.)

In modern days, may be "pingitan" was no more than folklore. But, data told the truth. Selected Social-Economics Indicators of Indonesia 2008 reported that there are some gap on gender term in Indonesian education. Adult literacy rate in Indonesia for Male reach 94,56% , for female just 88,39%. . Further, Mean years of schooling told similar sense. Indonesian male spend 7,9 years for schooling but female group only spend 7 year (approximately just finished elementary school.


Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposed The Black Swan Theory. There are some rare event beyond our normal expectations. We need not traveling to Western Australia in purpose to see the black swan (on denotative meaning). Let's us flight to Gorontalo (another new province after decentralization in Indonesia). On paragraph above, we saw such a disrimination by gender on Indonesian education. Women got less. But not at Gorontalo. Gorontalo's female have spend 7 years for shooling but their male spend 6,5 years. Same story on adult literacy rate, approx. 95,93% women an read, when only 95,47% of male.

I still couldn't explain why. Even a matrilinealistic culture like Minangkabau have, the data follow same pattern like normal gender disrcimination (adult literacy rate and mean years for schooling for women is less than male group). The Black Swan theory seems true. But, I also interested of one exciting fact. In Indonesia 79,6% of women have used contraceptive but 84,98% Gorontalo's women have it. It looks like there are some correlation between eduation and demographic problem, especially facing population booming.