Wednesday, May 23, 2007 Oledan: Myths By Radzini Oledan Slice Of Life
THE invisibility of women.
The other day, a colleague who works as a researcher posed the question on how women are often reflected as unemployed in the development statistics.
"Tell me, she emphatically said, from where does this statistics come from? Do they want to tell us that among genders, women are the ones who have idle time to loiter around? Where do they want to put women who are working almost 24/7 or those who would sacrifice and risk their lives to work overseas for their families while their husbands wait for their remittances?
Jing was referring to a development statistics which shows that a high percentage of women in the city are unemployed compared to men.
Hard statistics, I said, convinces people who know not the realities in various communities. But I am one who is easily swayed by the power of statistics to hide truth. As one of my professors said, it all boils down to lies, lies, lies and statistics.
The situation only points out to the reality that women are often excluded in development statistics. Their efforts are often unrecognized and no matter how 'open' our society appears to be, women would rather be seen as helpless and needing social support.
Along with the children, they are the same women who have to be taken cared of by development agencies and organizations.
They are there but their capability to contribute to the community remains unrecognized.
One may point out to the prevailing bias of those who are into data collection and subsequently, among those who analyze the data.
Another probability would be mere inefficiency. It could be a matter of habit for researchers to just to re-hash the data, which had been used 10 to 20 years ago which provides a completely different picture of women as they are today.
Truth to tell, such practice is alarming. The inability of policy researchers to question prevailing trends and of looking into the impact of their action to a sector, which has struggled to define their place in society.
Still, such bias may be reflective of the situation where women are often tracked into lowly paid service economy doing "feminine" labor and dead end jobs with a secondary wage earner status.
Women comprise 37.5 percent of the 32 million workers in the Philippines. Most of them are employed in the service industry and export processing zones (EPZ) where they are 75 percent of the workforce.
Seventy-seven percent of workers in the garment industry are women, and 72 percent in electronics.
They are the ones who are forced to work for long hours and confined in the areas of sales, education, domestic labor and in jobs that earn below the average wage rate. Only a few are protected by the collective bargaining agreement.
However, it is not only the low wages that women are concerned of but also their job security. The conversion of employment term into three to four months contractual work deprives them of the health benefits, leaves and other privileges for workers.
In the assembly lines of export processing zones, women are chosen because of traditional gender stereotypes. Women had "nimble fingers" which are suitable for small parts assembly, are more diligent and patient and therefore perfect for highly repetitive work, and more docile, therefore less likely to join unions or cause trouble.
Women are more willing to work for low wages and have a higher rate of voluntary turnover due to their supposed status as 'secondary wage earners' and the primacy of their reproductive role in the family."
The situation confirms rather than challenges culture-deep beliefs that woman's destiny is to be powerless and on the margins while man's destiny is to be powerful and to wield influence.
The U.N. Human Development Report estimated that unwaged and underwaged work is worth $16 trillion internationally.
Over two-thirds of this, or $11 trillion, is the non-monetized, invisible contribution of women. The report clearly linked the devaluation of women's work to women's poverty and lowered status in all regions of the world.
The revaluation of women's work should challenge the present convention. If women's work is accurately reflected in the national statistics, then it will shatter the myth that men are the main breadwinners of the nation, or of the city for that matter.
