Cielito Habito
Inquirer

WHEN OUR FAMILY GOES OUT FOR DINNER, when I bring our dirty clothes to the corner laundry to be washed, or when their teachers teach my children their lessons in school, these activities add to the nation’s reported gross national product (GNP).

When my wife cooks our family dinner, does the laundry, or helps the children with their homework, none of her efforts ever gets valued nor enters any economic accounts. Outside our own household, her true worth to the economy will never be fully appreciated.

Women contribute to the economy far more than what most people are aware of and what are recorded in the economic accounts. Perhaps as a consequence of this, their status in economic life has always been lower than that of men.

The evolution of the modern economy appears to be changing all this. Key trends shaping the nature of the economy at the global, national and local levels have impacts on the economic role and status of women in both positive and negative ways. These major economic trends include globalization, the rise of the Knowledge Economy, and resurgence of small enterprises.

Globalization trends
Globalization is reshaping the relative roles of women and men in economic life. The globalization process provides greater mobility for workers and expanded employment opportunities overseas. But this trend is accompanied by a growing proportion of women in non-standard work such as temporary, casual, multiple, contract and home-based employment. Thus, while globalization is raising the quantity of women’s recognized contributions to economic life through the labor force, the quality of their participation still needs to be seriously considered and addressed.

Women also now dominate labor migration, with nurses, caregivers, and especially domestic workers making up a substantial portion of such labor movement coming from Asia, particularly the Philippines. This has also led to changes in the host countries, where household work has been restructured from traditionally unremunerated work by housewives to a more formal economic activity undertaken by foreign domestic workers. This has in turn increased the labor force participation by women in general. While this may be seen as a positive trend especially from the point of view of the host economy, it comes at the cost of fracturing the families of the women migrant workers, along with the often tremendous social costs this entails.

Knowledge advantage
The second major economic trend is the dominance of information and communication technology (ICT) in the “New Economy” that has emerged in the 21st century. The basis for wealth creation in the modern economy is changing from the traditional “bricks and mortar” to “clicks and portals”. The more successful firms in the Knowledge Economy are those who have better access to information and knowledge, and no longer those who are in possession of greater fixed capital including real estate. This could be a positive factor for women, inasmuch as they now dominate tertiary education, as statistics in European and Asian countries would show. In the Philippines, 53.2 percent of college and university students are female. Thus, for as long as there is no gender gap in access to ICT, women seem to have the advantage in numbers to cash in on the knowledge-based economy.

SME resurgence
The third economic trend, which has to a large extent been facilitated by the second, is the resurgence in importance of small enterprises. With rapid developments in ICT, modern societies have seen a widespread return to small enterprises including home-based ones, even as globalization has also increased the number of transnational corporations (TNCs). Small firms that provide products ranging from services to manufactured goods are proliferating world wide. This has become possible because ICT and electronic commerce permits them virtually equal access to the global markets vis-…-vis their much larger counterparts, with savings in overhead costs compensating for their lack of economies of scale.

This trend has created wider opportunities for integrating formal economic activities with unremunerated domestic work, whether for men or women, but especially for the latter. Having to devote time for rearing children and managing the household need not deprive women anymore of the opportunity to become entrepreneurs. It’s not a one-sided situation either. The same trend also implies that men are increasingly able to participate more equitably in child rearing and home management, while still engaged in gainful enterprise.

Cultural biases
What needs to be overcome are the traditional cultural biases against women taking a more active role in formal economic life, and men taking a more active role in home and family management. Steps must also be taken to avoid a “gender divide” in ICT. And in the case of women employed in the “old economy,” whether as workers or managers, there is a need to eliminate the unfair wage differentials between men and women that still persist.

My wife runs a non-profit school and some community outreach projects along with it, balancing all that with managing our home, seeing to our five children’s welfare, and responding to my sometimes unfair demands as a husband. She earns just a fraction of what I make. Given what she contributes to our economy and society, I often feel it should be the other way around.

Comments are welcome at chabito@ateneo.edu