By Espie Angelica A. de Leon
The Gender Equality Report of SEEK Asia, a regional online job marketplace merging JobStreet and JobsDB, has revealed that while certain industries in the Philippines are either male- or female-dominated, the IT-enabled services and banking industry are more gender balanced.
Included among these IT-enabled services are business process outsourcing (BPO) firms such as call centers and medical transcription companies.
However, gender discrimination was mostly reported by survey participants from the computer, IT, and education sectors across Asia. Twenty-six percent of the 6,630 survey participants around the region work in these specialized fields.
JobStreet Philippines country manager Philip Gioca discussed these and other findings of the Gender Equality Report to the media at Jobstreet?s Mandaluyong office in July 11. The report was based on an online survey of employees in Hongkong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
The survey respondents were composed of 3,168 females and 3,462 males working in various industries. They included both fresh graduates and those in managerial positions.
For the Philippine survey, 74% of participants were in the 18-37 age bracket, 77% were college degree holders, and 55% were females.
While banking and IT-enabled services in the country boast of equal gender representation, construction and engineering as well as food and beverage have higher male representation. On the other hand, education and healthcare are mostly female-dominated.
In terms of gender composition in management, 38% of local companies said their management is composed mostly of men, 25% have mostly women, while 37% have equal gender representation in management positions.
Among respondents from the Philippines, 77% of males and 79% of females did not complain of any discrimination in the workplace. Of those who did, majority of them – 42% of females and 36% of males ? said they merely had a slight experience of gender discrimination in the office. The rest claimed they were discriminated upon very slightly, severely, very severely, or they did not experience it at all.
Majority of the male and female participants from the Philippines also reported fair treatment in terms of trainings provided, performance evaluations, and salary increases.
Overall, the Philippines emerged as the most gender balanced among the countries surveyed in terms of gender discrimination reports.
?I?m not saying everything is perfect [in the Philippines]. I think this is just a snapshot of how real discrimination is,? said Gioca.
The Gender Equality Report aims to generate awareness among corporations of the need for gender equality and fair treatment and encourage them to resolve issues related to discrimination.
