MANILA, Philippines?Among overseas Filipino workers, women still outnumber the men, except in the seafaring profession in which the preponderant majority are males.
OFWs should, therefore, be keenly interested in the enhanced protection that Filipino women will receive from the state as a result of the Magna Carta for Women, recently signed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
The Magna Carta for Women has many valuable provisions that protect women in the Philippines from certain cultural biases and abuses that still persist in some regions and sectors of our society. In some regions of Mindanao, for example, the educational attainment of women is much below the national average. The same thing can be said about their life expectancy. Much has to be done to promote the education and health (especially maternal health) of women in some of these regions. There is also need to apply the full force of the law against the trafficking of women, including their exploitation in pornographic advertisements and websites.
Looking into the future, however, there is an important change in cultural practices that will prevent the onset of what is known as the demographic winter that is already victimizing many advanced and not so advanced countries (like China and Thailand) because of the precipitous drop in fertility rates. The international press has been replete with articles about the way western society is living a cold demographic winter. OFWs working in such countries as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Germany witness at close range the explosion in the number of senior citizens and the relative absence of children and young people. In fact, many of our OFWs are the ones caring for the aging people in these countries.
As discussed in an article that appeared in the online magazine Mercator.net by an expert on women's rights, Professor Nuria Chinchilla of the IESE Business School said that for decades the birth rate in these countries has not reached 2.1 children per woman of a child-bearing age?the minimum required for a positive birth rate. Without children there will be fewer producers and consumers, and should this trend continue and be pushed to the extreme, society could die out. Fortunately, some of them are open to immigrant workers who can at least temporarily postpone the demographic collapse.
Demographers have estimated that in about 20 years, the fertility rate of the Philippines will be at less than 2 per fertile woman. We have to make sure that we don't suffer the dire consequences of a demographic winter. One factor that should be considered is the increasing participation of women in the workforce. According to Professor Chinchilla, the demographic winter is directly related to the fact that women have entered the workforce en masse and find themselves in a rigid business model that was conceived by men and for men at a time when there were strict gender roles for both men and women: women spent their time at home while men were dedicated full time to working outside the home.
What Professor Chichilla describes applies very much to the Philippine situation. Women have left the home to contribute their feminine vision to the workplace, but men still have not entered the home with their skills and their way of seeing and living life, as husbands, fathers, or as people who are equally responsible for the home. To make sure that in the future, couples who still want large families can still attain their desired family size, we should start preparing the young men of today to assume more responsibilities at home and not leave the task of bringing up children and taking care of the household exclusively to their spouses. Wives should be able to spend more time outside the home not only in practising their respective professions but in getting involved in non-governmental organizations of their choice or in pursuing goals outside of just earning more money for the family.
To help ease the usual tension that women face in deciding to have more children (which many of them naturally desire) and being active outside the home professionally or otherwise, husbands must learn the skills of housekeeping and childrearing that are usually relegated only to women. In this regard, for example, I am glad to observe many young males today taking interest in cooking. This could be the first step for the husbands in the future to spend more time at home in performing housekeeping and childrearing tasks in order to liberate their respective wives from some of their responsibilities at home.
Businesses can encourage this important shift in cultural practices in the Filipino family by granting paternity leaves also to their male employees. As Professor Chinchilla says in her report on family-friendly business practices, paternity leave is a very positive approach because it allows men to "come into the home" to live in it and enjoy it so that later both husband and wife may decide who is going to do what and how. This a great opportunity for fathers, more than for newborns, to get involved and engage more in family life.
It is not too early to start introducing these modifications in the traditional role of fathers and mothers in the Filipino family so that we will be ready for the time when our fertility rate drops to below replacement level and we begin to suffer from the ill effects of the demographic winter that is the most serious threat to the viability of the economies of the developed countries today. Those fighting for equal rights for women should be at the forefront of advocating for social and business policies that will encourage the more equal sharing of household tasks between husbands and wives. This is especially true if the mothers are the ones who are forced by economic necessity to work abroad as OFWs. The male spouses left behind should learn to be both father and other, even if only temporarily.
For comments, my e-mail address is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.
