The status of women in the Philippines: a 50-year retrospective

Lila Ramos Shahani – GMA News – Friday, 05 October 2012 (originally published 03 Oct)

Image: Francisco Guerrero / “What I see”

Looking back at the past 50 years, how do we assess the status of women in this country, particularly in light of recent debates on the reproductive health (RH) bill? While women make up over half of the population and their contribution to society has clearly been incalculable, a disparity remains between the fulfillment of their needs, on the one hand, and the services and protections afforded to them by the state, on the other.

Without a doubt, the institutional empowerment of women can be traced as far back as the Marcos era, with the establishment of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (now the Philippine Commission on Women) in 1975, which served — and continues to serve – as the national machinery for integrating women into the economic and socio-cultural fabric of the country.

Despite these limitations, what follows here is a brief examination of each presidential administration’s attempts to improve the welfare of women with respect to specific indicators of critical importance: education, employment, violence against women, and health – all of which demonstrate, in deeply fundamental ways, the integral part that gender has played in the developmental strategies crafted by each administration . . .

. . . read complete article . . .

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