Filipinas underqualify selves for overseas jobs

MANILA, Philippines - Filipino women often shelve their hard-earned college diplomas to enter jobs abroad which they are overqualified to do, an academe-based group on women including migration issues said on Friday.

Aurora Javate De Dios Women and Gender Institute (WAGI), said Filipinas who work abroad are often underemployed and contribute to the growing number of ‘brain waste’ in the country.

“Women are under qualifying themselves. The number of women migrating is increasing but the jobs placed for them are designated," De Dios told GMANews.TV on Friday. “There is hardly any country where women CEOs are in-demand."

De Dios, who presented a paper in the two-day International Conference on Gender Migration and Development in Manila, said women professionals like teachers or doctors would apply overseas as domestic helpers or nurses because the overseas labor market does not have any demand for foreign women in their previous fields.

According to her, receiving countries should have a paradigm shift, or a change in approach or assumptions, in the gender of foreign labor and acknowledge the great contributions of females in certain male-dominated fields.

Aiko Kikkawa of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) said the Philippines has the greatest number of migrant women than men who graduated in college compared with other labor-exporting countries such as India, China, and Mexico.

Based on IOM data more than 570,000 Filipina women with college degrees are pushed to work abroad.

Kikkawa said Filipino women also have a greater tendency to migrate and work abroad compared to males once they receive their tertiary education.

The deployment of more female OFWs began in the late 1970s with the rise of newly industrialized countries like Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea.

Most of the female workers were employed in "dirty, demeaning, and dangerous" low-skilled or unskilled jobs but were religious in sending remittances according to a 2007 report by the World Bank

The face of the OFW is still a woman

De Dios also assailed the de-feminization of labor as earlier reported by Administrator Carmelita Dimzon of the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration (OWWA).

Dimzon said that 60 percent of the 880,000 Filipinos who went overseas from January to August this year were males.

According to De Dios the real gauge of the feminization of labor is not only the numbers that “fluctuate from time to time" but it also manifests in the significant participation of women in the migration process.

Although statistically the percentage of women migrants has declined last year, the number still reached the million-mark which was not present several years ago.

“More men are working abroad as construction workers because of the oil boom in the Middle East,“ said Kikkawa of the IOM. “But this is only temporary."

Call to Action

Meanwhile, participants to the International Conference on Gender, Migration and Development have drafted a Manila Call to Action on Friday for the consideration of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).

The two-day forum was organized by the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women in partnership with other migrant worker groups and international institutions like the UNICEF and the International Labor Organization.

According to De Dios they will stress the need to seize more opportunities of women migrants as well as uphold their rights as women and human beings.

Among their recommendations were to ensure that recruitment agencies would be gender-sensitive in their approach so that both women and men would obtain decent jobs in accordance with their skills;

Foster good practices in reducing women's segregation and labor market segmentation; encourage banks to provide safe remittance channels; as well as promote equal representation of women with men in national and international consultation mechanisms on migration.

"Hopefully this will provide space for dialogue and incremental changes," De Dios said. - GMANews.TV