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Feminised Recession: The impact of the global financial crisis on women workers in the Philippines

53 pages

This research report is one of four country case studies commissioned by Oxfam GB on the impact of the global economic crisis on women in South East Asia. It concludes that women are over-represented in sectors where the crisis has caused huge job cuts: export manufacturing, the garments industry, electronics, and services. Women in the Philippines tend to be employed in precarious jobs where they are more likely to be fired first or to experience harsh working conditions, for example, as migrant workers and in the garment industry. The report also testifies to the ability of Filipino women to come up with creative and ingenious ways of coping and surviving. Particularly through the informal economy, this ability continues to provide women with alternative platforms for income generation. But policy changes are needed to make existing poverty-reduction programmes more effective, and to address the issue of casualization and other abuses of workers' economic and political rights.

KeywordsFinancial crisis Philippines