ASIA: WOMEN DO NOT BENEFIT FAIRLY FROM ECONOMIC GROWTH

Manila, Oct (IPS) - The impact of the Asian financial crisis in terms of employment and wages has been more severe on women than on men, who are heavily favoured in the workplace, says the International Labour Office (ILO) in Asia-Pacific.

Though already on the wane, the crisis which crippled much of east and southeast Asian economies from 1997, pushed many female workers out of secure, high-paying jobs into low-income work, the ILO said in a 100-page technical report.

In South Korea, for example, among regular workers, women's employment has dropped drastically by 20%, indicating the higher rates of retrenchment, while that for men dropped by only six percent.

In the Philippines, women's unemployment has risen to 15%, compared to 12% for men, according to the report entitled 'Towards Gender Equality in the World of Work in Asia and the Pacific'.

The report is the basis for discussion at the three-day Asian Regional Consultation on Follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women which opened in Manila on Wednesday.

The rate of unemployment among Indonesian women, the report adds, appears to have increased by less, 14%, than men's which rose by 27%, but women's incomes both in urban and rural areas fell further than men's.

"Indonesian women seem to have become more economically active but for less pay as a result of the crisis, over-stretching their limited resources and time," the 100-page report points out.

It says: "(The crisis) has deprived proportionately more women than men of formal sector jobs in most of the countries suffering from the crisis, and it has pushed many of them back into informal sector or agricultural households where they have to cope with lower incomes and higher burdens for themselves."

The quality of jobs available to women deteriorated as a result of the crisis -- as many lost stable jobs in formal sectors, replaced by either temporary, part-time or casual jobs -- but there is an upside to this in some cases.

Philippine Undersecretary Rosalinda Baldoz told reporters on Tuesday that many Filipino women who were thrown out of work were compelled to harness their entrepreneurial skills in order to augment meagre family incomes by putting up small businesses.

Quite expectedly, the financial crisis exposed the vulnerability of women to such crises, especially since poverty tends to affect women more than men, the report says, adding: "Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the agricultural sector, where income and wage levels are the lowest."

In Pakistan, in 1995, 67% of the women worked in agriculture compared to 44% among the men. In Cambodia, the figures were 79% for women and 71% for men while in Nepal, 91% for women and 75% men, and in Bangladesh, 78% women and 54% men.

In general, the report says that in all Asian countries, women's work can be classified as "low skill, low paid and low quality, in a limited number of sectors and occupations at the lower end of the job ladder".

Another characteristic of women's work in Asia is that it is often part-time, the report says.

Unremunerated work, usually in the form of household of voluntary work, is a critical form of women's work, but is almost universally unquantified, it adds.

A study available in Japan estimated that unpaid work represented between 15 and 23% of GDP in 1996, and was performed virtually entirely by women.

Despite the many constraints, women in general continue to work towards greater economic empowerment. ILO regional director for Asia-Pacific, Mitsuko Horiuchi said although women suffered disproportionately from the crisis, countries in Asia-Pacific have made and continue to make progress towards achieving the goals set out during the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995.

As spelled out in the Platform for Action, the areas of concern include the protection and promotion of human rights of women and the girl-child; eradicating their poverty, elimination of all forms of violence against women; and promoting their economic autonomy and their access to productive resources.

"We are moving closer to gender equality," says Horiuchi, though she concedes that "the traditional concept of 'men go to work and women stay at home' is still deeply rooted in Asian society."

As a result, she says, women do not benefit fairly from economic growth.

The ILO technical report says that high growth rates (before the crisis) and high shares of labour-intensive production have caused the significant reduction in gender gaps in markets of Asia-Pacific countries.

But it emphasises that both economic advances as well as supportive national policies must coalesce if the gap between the sexes is to be narrowed.

"Economic growth is essential but not sufficient to achieve gender equality in the world of work -- both because prevailing cultural factors impede progress toward equality, and because policies have to be in place to transform the economic potential into equitable distribution of gains," it says.

"In the absence of supportive policies, men rather than women will benefit from economic growth."

An indispensable factor in the gender equation, the report concludes, is protective legislation. "Without a regulatory stimulus, public and private employers may follow traditional lines of thinking and prefer to hire, remunerate, promote or dismiss one sex over the other, even where women have the same (lack of skills) or experience as men."

The above article by the Inter Press Service appeared in the South- North Development Monitor (SUNS) .