CEDAW/C/PHI/5-6 No. 634-1998). In Aklan Province, key interventions related to strengthening the Provincial GAD Coordinating Mechanism and advocacy with top local officials helped the province identify its priority gender issues and develop plans on such issues as reproductive health and violence against women. To date, about 30 LGUs have enacted such ordinances. 97. There are, however, certain areas that remained static or became worse than they were in the late 1990s. Areas of Concern Political Participation of Women 98. Women’s political participation has not shown any significant progress, as women remained marginalized in the political arena. Poverty in Rural Areas 99. The situation of women in rural areas is still an area of grave concern. While a number of policies and programs to alleviate poverty have been put in place especially in the countryside, gaps in implementation and the economic crisis being experienced in the country tend to obviate any possible benefits to women’s condition. Unemployment Rate 100. The poor state of the Philippine economy has driven people out of the country to search for job opportunities or to permanently settle abroad. Except for one or two years, female unemployment rate remains higher than that of the male. Overseas work is continuously being feminized as more and more women, married and unmarried, are forced to seek for better paying jobs. While bringing in dollars to prop up the sagging economy, overseas employment exposes women to dangers of trafficking, prostitution, sexual abuse and subjects them to cultural dislocation, social isolation in host countries, the emotional pain of separation from loved ones and family disintegration. Employment Conditions of Women Workers in Manufacturing Industries 101. Concern is drawn to the economic situation of women in a period of globalization and the financial and economic crisis of the late 1990s. A number of women workers in industries such as garments and handicrafts were displaced, as local producers lost out to cheaper imports in the domestic market and cheaper exports of other countries in the global market. Informal Sector Workers 102. The dire economic and employment conditions in the manufacturing industries forced many of these women to enter low paying, vulnerable and insecure jobs, and to join the informal sector, a hazardous, unprotected and mostly unregulated sector where workers are marginalized and have no access to amenities or support systems. The size of the informal sector has been placed between 52 percent and 85 percent,12 with the decline that was noted from the 1980s to 1998 arrested briefly in 1999, as the sector slightly expanded from 51.0 percent to 51.7 percent (Yu 2001). 12The lower estimate pertains to the percentage of own-account and unpaid family workers to total number of employed workers based on the Labor Force Surveys, while the higher estimate is derived by getting the difference between the economy-wide employment data reported in the household labor force survey net of government employees and the establishment based employment data (Yu 2001). 39