Asian crisis hurt women more than men: Report

Asian crisis hurt women more than men: Report

MANILA (AFP): Asian women and children were left worse off than men after the region's gravest financial crisis in half a century, the International Labor Organization (ILO) said in a report released here on Tuesday.

Shrinking economies left more women out of work than men while those who held on to their jobs had to make do with less pay, and the crisis "is generally believed to have pushed more girls than boys out of school and into work," the UN agency said in a regional report.

ILO officials told a news conference they had yet to quantify the possible effects of the crisis on the problem of trafficking in women and children, an acute problem in a number of less developed countries in Asia even before the mid-1997 currency meltdown.

The findings "show how vulnerable women are" in a region where "millions of women are underpaid and under-employed and millions more are working without pay at all," said ILO regional director Mitsuko Horiuchi.

While situations varied greatly among countries in the region, available data generally indicate "that the situation of women has deteriorated farther than the situation of men," said Roger Bohning, an ILO director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

The report said that the women's labor force participation rate in South Korea dropped 4.4 percent since the crisis, while the rate for men had remained "virtually constant.

"Among regular workers, women's employment has dropped drastically by 20 percent, indicating higher rates of retrenchments, while that for men has dropped by only six percent."

In the Philippines, women's unemployment surged 15 percent, compared to 12 percent for men.

While the gender-differentiated impact of the crisis on employment and incomes was less well defined in Thailand and Indonesia, "women's incomes are reckoned to have dropped by less than did men's, possibly implying that firms were replacing men with lower-waged women."

Fewer women than men in Indonesia became jobless, but in both urban and rural areas, "women's incomes fell further than men's, with six percent and four percent differentials respectively," the report said.

It acknowledged that income and wage data by gender was very scarce across countries. But in general, disparities were more pronounced in the low-growth economies.

The report also dealt with the situation of 70 million Asian women who migrated for work, who it said "are often channeled into the most vulnerable occupations, notably household and commercial sex work, often outside the scope of migration or labor laws."

While there were fewer women migrant workers in Asia in 1995, "women have begun to redress the gender imbalance by dominating the authorized outflows from sending countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka."

Indonesian labor officials processed five women for every man for overseas employment in 1998 and 1999, compared to three men for every two women in 1983-1984, it said.

The report said more than three in five of the world's working children are found in developing Asia, where they total 153 million and girls account for 46 percent.

"Hazardous work seems to be allocated to children on a disproportionate scale," it said, citing street scavengers and fishermen in Indonesia, and children factory workers who are "exposed to silica, sawdust, paint fumes, insecticides" and the like in the Philippines.

It cited studies which showed that school enrollment for girls had declined more for girls than boys in Indonesia, with school- age girls also worse off in the Philippines.

The number of children placed in state orphanages jumped 40 percent from a year earlier in 1998 in South Korea, and rose another 40 percent in the current year, Bohning said.