Gender Gap Bali — A Low Score With a Complicated Story Underneath

Power — Inheritance, Family Status, and a Seat in the DPRD

The dimension that most distinguishes Bali from the rest of Indonesia isn’t political representation, though that gap is real too. It’s a customary inheritance system that predates any national law and still operates alongside it.

Under Balinese adat (customary) law, sons hold purusa status: they are heirs, they carry the family name forward, and they inherit the family’s ancestral property, including the household temple (sanggah). Daughters traditionally hold predana status, and under that status they are not heirs. A family with only daughters is, in the traditional framing researchers still hear in the field, treated as having no children at all, because a daughter cannot be counted on to continue the family line. The practical effect: women can be written out of their own family’s land, obligations, and communal standing purely on account of birth order and sex.

Bali does have paths around this, and they’ve genuinely evolved. A daughter can be granted sentana rajeg status, effectively reclassifying her as a son for inheritance purposes, usually when a family has no male children. In 2010, the Majelis Utama Desa Pakraman (MUDP) Bali, the island’s highest traditional-village authority, issued a decree recognizing daughters’ right to a partial inheritance share called gunakaya, typically half of what a son would receive. But researchers who study how this plays out in individual villages consistently find that the older kapurusa principle still governs in practice, encoded in each village’s own awig-awig (customary bylaws), and that a national decree from Denpasar doesn’t automatically override centuries of village-level custom. Legal scholars describe the current situation as a genuine duality: Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution and its CEDAW commitments guarantee gender equality on paper, while customary law, still very much a living legal system in Bali, keeps the purusa-predana distinction intact underneath it.

Formal political representation shows a smaller but related gap. Women hold 10 of the 55 seats (18.2%) in the Bali Provincial DPRD elected in 2024, below Indonesia’s national figure of 21.9% in the House of Representatives the same year, and well short of the 30% candidate quota that applies to every party list. BPS Bali’s own empowerment dimension singles out exactly this: the gap between men’s and women’s rates of at least a senior-high-school education, one of the index’s core inputs, widened in 2024 rather than narrowed.