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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Women lead in literacy race
By Charmaine Y. Rodriguez
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
Despite having a male-dominated workforce, Central Visayas has a higher literacy rate for females, the latest National Statistics Office (NSO) survey on literacy shows.
According to the 2003 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (Flemms), the 2.28 million female respondents 10 years old and over had a basic literacy rate of 93.2.
About 83.6 percent of 2.13 million females 10 to 64 years old were functionally literate.
Basic literacy refers to the ability to read and write, while functional literacy means the ability to read, write, compute and comprehend, said NSO 7 statistician Nicolas Gultiano.
Functional literacy also involves higher-level thinking, which allows the individual to function effectively in society, NSO 7 Director Lilia Tandoc further explained.
The Flemms showed that the 2.314 million males 10 years old and over only had a basic literacy rate of 91.5.
The 2.28 million male respondents 10 to 64 years old had a functional literacy rate of 79.8.
During the presentation of the Flemms results last week, Eunoco Arellano of the Department of Labor and Employment 7 expressed concern on the figures.
“Is there a program to convince parents to send their male children to school so they could become better breadwinners?” Arellano asked Emiliano Elnar Jr. of the Department of Education (DepEd) 7.
Jobs
Elnar said that with poverty forcing male children to work, the situation will be difficult to change.
According to the survey, 34.8 percent of the 881,000 respondents six to 24 years old said they were not in school because of their jobs or because they were looking for jobs.
Tandoc noted that the 2003 Flemms did not include disaggregated data on how many male and female respondents indicated employment as the reason they were not in school.
However, the third quarter NSO labor force survey in 2004 showed that of the region’s 2.1 million work force, 128,000 of the women earned diplomas and only about 108,000 males finished college.
Cherry Ballescas, a sociologist and a social science professor at the University of the Philippines-College Cebu, said studies show that more women stay in school and have a higher participation rate.
Culture may have also helped female children to behave better in schools.
With the training and discipline of female children at homes, they tend to be more diligent.
However, she said surveys on agricultural areas show that the demand for workers, including children, is gender-free.
“They allow whoever is available,” she said.
Gender pattern
She also noted that despite the number of working children in urban areas, like newspaper boys and vendors, most of them still have the opportunity to go to school.
“(Males) are seen as the brawn, so they are seen as `bogo’ (dumb). Parents tend to invest on their daughters in education,” she said.
Studies on remittances of overseas Filipino workers indicate that females—the daughters and wives—send money to their relatives without fail.
“Because they (females) care. There is a gender pattern. However, more studies are still needed to be done to prove this trend,” Ballescas said.
Meanwhile, Central Visayas scored high in the Flemms, compared with other regions.
It had an average of 92.4 percent basic literacy rate compared with the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao’s (ARMM) 70.2 percent. The National Capital Region scored 99 percent.
For functional literacy, Central Visayas scored 81.7 percent, compared with the nationwide lowest rate of 62.9 percent, for the ARMM.
(December 28, 2005 issue)
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