2. Advocate for girl-child education and equal rights for men and women in
communities. Increasing the literacy rate of women will give them better opportunities
to economic activities and encourage a balance in the sharing of production and care
work responsibilities with male family members.
Recommendations to recognize care work:
3. Collection of data on women who perform unpaid care work should be
institutionalized. This should be further disaggregated into women living in rural and
urban communities due to the disparity in their situation, the latter having more access
to technology and services. Institutionalizing the data collection would require careful
planning to ensure that relevant data in relation to unpaid care work can be captured to
aid legislation and development of social policies that will help ease rural women’s
multiple burden. The Philippine Statistics Authority, Philippine Commission on Women
and Commission on Human Rights have key roles and can collaborate to push this
endeavour.
4. Legislators should create and enact laws that will recognize and give value to women’s
unpaid work. Giving value should translate to government programs that will provide
more rights and benefits for these women such as social protection. The government
can also provide rural women more access to basic services, such as health care and
education, to share their multiple burden in performing care work. Laws and policies
should also be created to reduce women’s difficulty and time spent on care work.
Recommendations to reduce care work:
5. Increase rural women’s access to infrastructure and services. The rural women leader
representatives at the workshop particularly identified the following:
● Electricity in their community. This will allow the use of simple electrical tools
and fixtures to help rural women in their care work.
● Closer distance to water sources. Access to safe, clean and nearby water sources
will help rural women save time and effort in fetching water for their families.
● Access roads. Journey to markets, schools and water sources will be easier and
safer for rural women and travel time will be shorter with the access roads.
● Close proximity of schools and day care centers where they would bring their
children. This would result to less travel time in bringing and fetching children
from schools and day care centers.
Recommendations to redistribute care work:
6. Unpaid care work should be shared by men and women. Care work responsibilities at
home should be shared by men and women. Women should learn to speak up to assert
the need for the shared responsibilities at home. Children can also be taught simple
chores to help reduce the care work activities of rural women.
7. Explore and develop policies that would encourage a more balanced performance of
care work between men and women. For instance, corporations and business
employers can implement human resource policies such as flexible working hours for
both men and women to allow them to arrange a more balanced appropriation of time
and effort in caring for their children and other family members. An increase in paid
paternal leave to allow fathers to provide more care for their infants may also be
explored.
21
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