When the Malaysian government imposed a Movement Control Order in mid-March, requiring almost all workplaces to close and employees to work from home, after a sharp rise in coronavirus cases, the last thing it expected was jokes about men shopping. But a specific measure of the Movement Control Order, or MCO, is to allow only one person, the “head of the family,” to go out to buy groceries. Despite there being close to 240,000 single mothers in Malaysia, who are likely in charge of their households, the presumption remains strong that the head of the family is a man. After this announcement, jokes abounded among Malaysians on how untenable it is to make a man go out to buy fish and vegetables because knowledge about these things is the woman’s domain. The Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development did not ask how this rule might impact single mothers going…

Two years year after South Korea became the centre of Asia’s #MeTooMovement, the country’s first feminist party is hoping to keep women’s issues on the political agenda by winning seats in Wednesday’s national assembly elections. In a campaign dominated by the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic, the newly formed Women’s party has warned that South Korea’s poor record on sexual discrimination and violence risked being overlooked. Young women have shaken up the country’s political culture in recent years with high-profile campaigns targeting the country’s molka spy cam voyeurism epidemic, strict beauty standards and the decades-old ban on abortion. Despite its economic power, technological prowess and the soaring global popularity of its pop music and cuisine, South Korea remains a deeply conservative, patriarchal society. It ranked 108th out of 153 on the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Gap Index, while women comprise just 17% of MPs in the national assembly – well below the global average of about 25% – according…