Beyond parity in education: gender disparities in labour and employment outcomes in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines is a model country in terms of gender equality, ranking ninth in the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Global Gender Gap Index and first in Asia and the Pacific. This is particularly true with regard to education as girls outperform boys in most education indicators. Significant gender disparities persist, however, especially with regard to employment. This article seeks to assess the extent to which the outperformance of female over male students fails to translate to gender parity in wages and if such gender differences in income are significant. It draws on data from the July 2011 quarter of the Philippine Labour Force Survey, employing the Mincerian earnings function to assess the returns of education for men and women. This article finds that gender disparities in income persist at all levels of educational attainment and are most pronounced at the lower socioeconomic strata.

Keywords:

• gender gap
• education
• wage differential
• employment
• Philippines

Notes

1. Orazem et al. (2008) estimate that every additional year of schooling has a median increase of 8–10% on a child’s future earnings.

2. Age is used as a proxy for work experience as the number of years of schooling is beyond the scope of the dataset.

3. The annual differential was computed by multiplying the 62 PHP daily pay differential by 365, the number of working days in a year, as specified by the National Wages and Productivity Commission (http://www.nwpc.dole.gov.ph/faq.html).

4. 100 PHP is equivalent to approximately 2.3199 US Dollars.

5. P-values less than 0.01 are denoted by ***. P-values greater than 0.01 but less than 0.05 are denoted by **. Values greater than 0.05 but less than 0.1 are denoted by *. For further reference on the expand results, see appendix Tables A2 and A3.

6. The remaining 197 or 16.4% of 1200 Filipino respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement.