PH women empowerment (Part 1-2)

Corie Raymundo. PHOTO BY MATTHEW REYSIO-CRUZ

(Part 1)

What the last polls show

When Pasig City Councilor Boy Raymundo died halfway into his term in 2014, a vacancy opened that no one wanted to fill: the chairmanship of the antidrug abuse committee.

It was years before President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs took the campaign to an unprecedentedly brutal level, but even then, the prospect of taking on drug dealers in a city notorious for its “shabu tiangge”—flea market for crystal meth—was political dynamite.

The chairmanship remained vacant. Two years later, Corie Raymundo was elected to the seat her late husband had occupied, becoming the only woman on the 12-member city council.

She was also, it turned out, the only councilor willing to head the antidrug committee.

Raymundo moved quickly to grow the number of drug-cleared villages, but also injected antidrug efforts with “soft aspects”—policies that place primacy on people’s needs—drawing on her experience in supervising an after-school program for teenage drug dependents.

“Nobody would take care of it,” Raymundo said of the antidrug committee. So she did.

This is just one example, according to lawmakers and analysts, of the ways that women have enriched debate, influenced decision making, and vastly expanded the scope of legislation in city councils—not just in traditional women’s issues but in everything from security to trade policy.

But while a majority of the electorate in the 2019 midterm polls was female, women made up only 27 percent of all Metro Manila councilors sworn in last June. And until 2022, none of the capital’s 17 local governments will have a council that achieves parity among the sexes.

Mayen Juico. PHOTO BY MATTHEW REYSIO-CRUZ

Glass ceiling

Valenzuela City, at a middling 42 percent, comes the closest. The cities of Pasig and Marikina and the municipality of Pateros have only one female councilor. Las Piñas City has none, despite being run by a female mayor.

“The thinking that politics is a man’s world is still there,” said Councilor Mayen Juico of Quezon City, where 14 of 36 councilors are women. “We have yet to break the glass ceiling.”

The annual Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum (WEF) released in December shows that the crisis is national in scope. The Philippines is still No. 1 in Asia in attaining gender equality, but its overall rank slipped eight places—from eighth in 2018 to 16th in 2019.

Among four categories measured, the Philippines again got its lowest mark in political empowerment with 0.353 out of 1. Not only is this just slightly higher than the country’s score of 0.269 when the report first debuted in 2006, it was actually a decline from last year’s 0.416.

“The political empowerment gap has widened considerably over the past two years,” the WEF said. Female representation in the Cabinet fell from a quarter in 2017 to just 10 percent last year. Women make up 28 percent of Congress—closely mirroring the 27 percent in Metro Manila councils.

The WEF findings indicate that the Philippines has yet to close over 60 percent of its gender gap in politics, where gains among women have typically been limited to those from wealthy, well-connected clans.

Even the country’s two former female heads of state, Corazon Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, were “introduced” to the electorate by their husband and father, respectively, pointed out Maria Ela Atienza, chair of the University of the Philippines (UP) Department of Political Science.

Their unconventional paths to the presidency—both were ushered in by revolutions against unpopular predecessors—masked the hostile terrain and deep-seated biases that still plague women with an eye on public office, Atienza said.

TOPS IN ASIA, BUT . . . The Philippines remains No. 1 inAsia in attaining gender equality, but its global rank slipped eight places—eighth in 2018 to 16th in 2019—according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. —INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Land mines

According to Nathalie Africa-Verceles, head of the UP Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the whole political process, from deciding whether to seek office to running a campaign and, finally, winning, is akin to navigating a minefield.

“At every point of the way, there’s always a stumbling block women have to overcome,” she said.

One of the most glaring explanations for the dearth of female representation is that so few seek public office in the first place. Filipino women face a 20-percent gap in economic opportunity with men, and in a country where money governs elections, this makes mounting a campaign a daunting task.

“Inevitably, you’re going to face a competitor who [has] resources,” Verceles said. “Which brings us to the question of which women have resources.”

Those without a war chest could theoretically rely on the coffers of political parties, but no major party here has made parity between male and female candidates a priority. Without this kind of deliberate effort, built-in barriers will continue to filter out women, keeping the status quo intact.

Risa Hontiveros, one of only seven women in the Senate, told the Inquirer that she had filed Senate Bill No. 1696 to address this matter. The proposed legislation calls for an “equitable gender distribution of the candidates of political parties.”

It proposes that at least 30 percent of party leadership be open to women—an assurance that a woman will always be in the room when high-stakes decisions are made.

Atienza also proposed a “zipper formula” that could require party list groups to alternate nominees between the sexes.

But even women with institutional support grapple with a potent cocktail of gender stereotypes, cultural norms and societal expectations that form a kind of Great Wall they must overcome before even thinking of breaking the glass ceiling.

“[People] think women are not appropriate to be leaders because they’re seen as weak, emotional, indecisive, irrational—all these attributes that are seen as natural to women and that we know are not,” Verceles said.

(Part 2)

‘Callousness,’ biases still await PH women breaking into politics

“In the political arena in particular, women are marginalized because we are constantly underestimated,” said Sen. Risa Hontiveros. “People think we’re not as tough or not as smart [as men].”

And the obstacles don’t dissolve even when women are elected to public posts. Being in a male-dominated institution brings a new set of challenges: The female councilors spoke of having to constantly educate their male peers on gender issues and needing to make certain adjustments to be seen as equal.

When Quezon City Councilor Mayen Juico’s anticatcalling ordinance was passed—the first of its kind in the country at the time—she was barraged with questions from male legislators: Do we really need this? Are women still being harassed?

And when she successfully pushed a law expanding benefits for solo parents, Juico, a single mother herself, said her male peers had wondered: “If we increase the benefits of solo parents, won’t more people want to separate?”

“Oh my goodness,” she sighed to the Inquirer. “In such a progressive urban city, we still experience those comments. There’s that level still of callousness.”

And it transcends city lines, too. When Pasig City Councilor Corie Raymundo authored a law for the construction of halfway homes for abused women, her male colleagues asked: “What about us guys? What if we’re the ones beaten up?”

“I said, ‘Propose your own ordinance, then,’” she recalled. “It’s difficult for them to appreciate when we say there is gender insensitivity or inequality that could affect the development of the city. Women are half the population. We should be getting an equal say.”

Pioneering work

To understand what is lost when women are absent from politics, one can look to the pioneering work being done in these city councils—the Philippines’ most basic and arguably most significant legislative unit—made possible by female representatives.

Juico ticked off ordinances pushed by women in Quezon City that, among others, instituted a human milk bank, established a protection center for gender-based violence victims, and prohibited the sale of sugary drinks in schools.

She herself championed an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. It was hailed at the time as the most comprehensive such ordinance and one that has since been adopted by several other Metro Manila cities.

Raymundo said that had she not been in Pasig, it was unlikely that the local council of women, a loose federation of women-centered nonprofits, would have been formed.

She also produced an information sheet—packaged with sleek graphics, easy to follow and distributed citywide—that took in mind all the different aspects of a woman’s life and detailed what projects and services they could avail themselves of from the city.

Said Dr. Maria Ela Atienza of the University of the Philippines (UP): “When you have more women empowered, that will actually create safer streets, safer communities, [and] children will be protected.” And it doesn’t stop there. Women can also contribute profoundly to, say, finance and trade policy. But while men are allowed to be experts in any issue, women are often pigeonholed into chairing such committees as social welfare, health and environment.

Women’s perspective

“Our assertion is always that all issues are women’s issues,” said Dr. Nathalie Africa-Verceles, also of UP. “So there’s a women’s perspective to every issue.”

Inflation, for example, does not affect women and men equally, she said. Women, as those “principally responsible for ensuring there is food on the table,” are the ones burdened with figuring out how to stretch a minuscule budget to meet her family’s needs.

Imagine, said Atienza, what the war on drugs might have looked like in Metro Manila if women were at the helm. In the wake of the thousands of extrajudicial killings, women have emerged as the movers of their communities. It’s women who have demanded justice, she pointed out.

“They can contribute in different issues in the same way men can,” Atienza said. “They can also contribute to peace and order, security issues and economic development. They also have a say in disaster management, in risk reduction.”

In Congress, stronger female representation wouldn’t just mean more momentum for causes like divorce and a national antidiscrimination law; it would also precipitate a fundamental transformation of the debate on nearly every issue.

But while women are a narrow majority of registered voters—51 percent in the last year’s midterms—this has failed to translate into a women’s vote. And President Duterte’s approval ratings show that many are willing to overlook his use of sexist, demeaning and occasionally violent language.“Women are supposed to be forgiving and patient, right?” Verceles said. “They give men in office so much leeway because that’s also how they’re used to dealing with men in their lives.”“Women themselves are also conditioned by patriarchal thinking. It’s not their fault,” she said.

It also doesn’t help, according to Atienza, that as politics has crystallized into a family sport, prominent women are willing to put class interests over genuine advocacy.

Grassroots level

“Women everywhere are divided by class,“ Atienza said. “There are women who are part of traditional political families who have to prioritize the survival of not just their personal political interests but also of their political family.”

This is why any hope of change in representation must start with education and organizing at the grassroots level, said Juico.

“You have to go down and change the culture also—and that doesn’t happen overnight,” she said.

The resource persons for this report said that for the fight for gender equality to succeed, it must include all sectors of society, including men.

“We always say men are dominant, women are subordinate. But that does not mean we want to overturn it,” Verceles said. “What we want to do is have more men acknowledge the reality and the injustice of unequal gender relations and hopefully understand that there’s a need to equalize.”Even more important than the number of women is ensuring that representatives are real allies, they said, adding that true equality would be the day a woman without vast financial or political resources could run for public office with the same confidence as a Villar or a Cayetano.There is much work to be done, Raymundo said. But as long as she remains the lone woman in the Pasig council, she is “not giving up.”