Cerebral Combustion
Desperate housewives make the country billions richer
In the first day of my job after I got hired as a production staff and writer of a television network, I knew from the moment I walked in towards the studio that I spawned myself a new found glory. It's like giving birth to a new significant self-excitedly stimulated by a different milieu of conquest waiting for me to be explored.
I started last Monday and already within three days I cannot contain the joy I felt of being a Kapuso Team. This is an avenue of another noble experience for me and while my Arangkada boss, Rexcel Sorza, apparently had minor apprehensions of my physical capabilities during the final interview, I have yet to prove that I am more than ready to be immersed in the world of television albeit working behind the cameras.
My work only require a considerably small amount of time, starting at six in the morning and by eight o'clock, when there are no more staff orientations and meetings, I am already home doing mommy chores and opening the family business. Except for out of town shoots and interviews which I am required to be present, I have the rest of the day for other responsibilities.
Since the beginning of the country's reversion to poverty a large percent of Filipino married women work to generally help compensate the family's financial needs. While the seemingly erratic schedule of my work proves to be beneficial to a doting mother, but to one with a growing family with an average source of income, an even more stable working hour is necessary to generate more financial aid to the family. Recently, the trend is that marriage or having kids is not a hindrance to a woman's necessity to work.
The nation's population comprises an estimated 44 million of women and large fractions of married women holding a normal day job as projected in the country's work force went up to 56 percent as of October 2007's survey. They have been joining the labor force partly out of economic necessity and partly in response to economic opportunity. According to Labor and Employment Statistics, Filipina women in the work force are more educated than men, proven with the fact that one-fifth of working women in the Philippines has completed college as compared to only one-tenth of working men. In the occupational hierarchy, where men may earn more, statistics showed recently striking earning differences. In professional and technical occupations, women's earnings exceed men's by 40 percent. In clerical and sales work, they earn 15 percent to 17 percent more, respectively.
Even undergraduate women aspire more than just being a plain housewife as more of them play an increasingly influential role in the country's economy. Women as factory workers, skilled laborers, especially OFWs are now already part and parcel of economic development. Particularly the OFWs where the money that they send back to the country amounts billions of dollars in remittances. Last year, the Philippines has reportedly collected an estimated amount of $14.7 billion from workers abroad, making the country the 4th largest recipient of foreign remittances behind India, China, and Mexico.
Contrary to women with a family who work merely for personal motivations, most married women instead of being preoccupied in the household join their partners in providing the seemingly expensive price of pleasure and needs of the family. These days the most important thing is that under adverse conditions their family can survive so given with the limited choices, joining the work force is only a survival strategy to ensure foremost the welfare of the family.
This is a sad reality many of us face -- risking desperate housewives waiting for change; for glory. But while this country remains dumped in the quagmire of meaningless inhibitions, women with work consider themselves blessed. Today I am, or maybe you are too, but with the way I see this world is going, perhaps we are next when we too need to do what we have to do to endure and survive.