Bangkok, October 27, 1999 -- Women in the Asia-Pacific region have borne the brunt of the impact of the Asian economic crisis, a panel of experts speaking at an ongoing intergovernmental meeting here said yesterday.
Delegates from 60 countries in the region are here for the UN-sponsored High Level Intergovernmental Meeting to Review Regional Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action. Proceedings of this meeting will be the region's input to a Global Review of the implementation of the commitments made by the world's governments at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
Speaking on the "Economic Empowerment of Women," researchers Jayati Ghosh and Jeanne Frances Illo, and Mitsuko Horiuchi of the Asia Pacific ILO office traced the impact of the Asian economic crisis on women in the region. Ghosh noted that the closure of many private enterprises as well as the downsizing of others have resulted in lowered labor standards and types of work for women. In the face of the economic crisis, noted Ghosh, an academic from India, conventional wisdom dictated that workers be more "flexible" in their demands, accepting cuts in pay and erosions in their benefits if they wanted to keep their jobs. "We should stop assuming that a flexible labor force is the only way to develop our economies," Ghosh said, adding that governments and the private sector have yet to explore other ways of mitigating the impact of economic shocks while protecting and preserving the status of workers.
Illo, who is coordinator of the Women's Studies Programme of the Institute of Philippine Culture, said that while figures would show that most of those who lost their jobs after the crisis struck were men, "lay-offs of women pre-dated the crisis." So that, she noted, even as majority of the newly jobless are men, unemployment rates of women remain higher than those of men.
As a result of the economic crisis, Illo said that in Indonesia and the Philippines in particular, "women flocked to the informal sector," that is, to low-paying, unregulated and untaxed forms of work, including sex work, which "increased their vulnerabilities and provided them little social protection."
The impact was even worse for migrant women workers, especially those in host countries affected by the crisis, who were laid-off and thus forced to go into more vulnerable and more inferior forms of labor. And because they faced even greater hardships back home, many of these migrant workers were forced to go underground and take on illegal employment.
Children, but especially girls, were also greatly affected by the crisis. To survive, families were forced to ask a child, often the oldest daughter, to stop schooling and find work or take over the mother's domestic duties. The crisis also resulted in "more intensive use of child labor," including trafficking and prostitution of girls and boys.
Among the reactions to the panel presentation, the "economic empowerment working group" of the NGO Caucus at this regional meeting declared that the economic crisis "exacerbated inequalities between women and men" in the region. The group called on governments in Asia and the Pacific "to consider the social and gender consequences of IMF and World Bank re-structuring programs," while expressing disappointment that "women in the region continue to experience difficulty in accessing credit." They also asked governments to improve its system of accounts, and in gathering statistics particularly on "women's low-paid and unpaid work."
*The Isis/Unifem Media Team for the ESCAP High Level Interngovernmental Meeting to review the implmentation of the Beijing Platform for Action is composed of Mavic-Cabrera-Balleza, Lorna Israel, Isis International-Manila; Suchita Vemuri, Women's Feature Service; Babita Basnet, Sancharika Samuha-Nepal; Adelle Khan, Fiji Women's Crisis Centre; Ung Vanna, Khmer Women's Voice Centre; Lim Siu Ching, All Women's Action Society-Malaysia; Fatmawati Salapuddin, Bangsamoro Women and Development Foundation-Philippines; Rina Jimenez-David, Philippins, Chitraporn Vanaspong, Thailand. The Media Team is supported by UNIFEM.
