Of Women and Wealth

Three hundred and thirty three years of Hispanic rule have drastically transformed the Philippines from a society that used to offer equal opportunities for women to a strongly patriarchal one.  Before the Spaniards conquered the Philippines, women were pretty much allowed to do what traditional patriarchal societies have boxed up as “man’s work.”  In short, women could become heads of their families or villages, they could earn properties like land and cattle, and if they were born into a ruling a family, they didn’t need to get married to succeed their parents’ throne.

Several battles for independence from its foreign colonizers later (and let’s throw in the onset of the women’s liberation movement in the Philippines), Philippine society is still on the process of breaking free from the inertial reigns wrought by patriarchy.  It doesn’t necessarily take a rocket scientist to know that several women in the Philippines continue to wallow in poverty, to suffer from violence, and to miss opportunities to advance their careers thanks to discrimination.

Despite the proliferation of women’s rights groups in the Philippines like GWAVE and Gabriela, so much work still needs to be done to smash the glass ceiling and to change the mindsets of both men and women, that women are not behind men—they are, in more ways than one, equal to men  in achieving success, in fighting alongside and even against them in actual combat as well as in intellectual sparring.  Women could even be the Philippines’ secret weapon towards making it through the global financial crisis that’s rocking several countries, especially the developing world today.

This year’s Women’s Month celebration focuses on the theme, “Babae, Yaman Ka ng Bayan!” which roughly means that women are the wealth of nations.  More than anything, it highlights the crucial role that women have in nation building.  In the Philippines, more than half of the people submerged or teetering along the poverty line are women.  Most of these women are poor because they could not go to school and therefore are unable to gain the necessary skills to earn a living and improve their lives.  They could not go to school because it is ingrained the sub-conscious minds of post-colonial Philippine society that a woman’s place is in the household and not to earn money and improve the family’s standard of living. This makes it even harder for them and their families to escape the vicious cycle of poverty.

To battle the financial crisis, the Philippines must take serious steps towards tapping half of the country’s potential economic resource—women.  One of the four wheels that can greatly spur economic growth is a well-developed pool of human resources.  The Philippines has every reason to invest in creating a more gender-responsive environment which can offer women several opportunities to grow, to develop, and to greatly contribute to the economy.  The Philippines is already on the right track with the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP) 2004-2010 which is bent on creating three million enterprises and ten million jobs, with women as the main target of micro-finance initiatives.

The Philippines doesn’t really need to look beyond its borders for solutions in trying to get by during one of the country’s most economically trying times.  It only needs to look at its women—the real wealth of the nation.