A little overview of some of my work.
This was delivered by my boss in a forum in Germany last March 2017.
Let me know your thoughts about it! Happy reading! 🙂
Like in other countries, the business landscapes have changed in the Philippines with the advent of advanced technologies and various disruptive business models. We are now facing the rise of a new economy – the digital economy. Countries around the world are now shifting from traditional to digital.
Today, my task is to share with you what the Philippines is doing to promote women entrepreneurship and startups.
As the Philippines’ embraces the rise of a digital economy, the government has been fast tracking policies and interventions that would uplift the innovative spirit of Filipino entrepreneurs and would enable an environment for new breed of businesses to thrive.
In the past, we have been implementing various interventions that would help women improve their entrepreneurial skills, capacitate their businesses, and access new markets. But among these initiatives, on top of my list and probably my favorite, are the interventions that we do that focus on Women in Technology.
CHANGE OF MINDSET: AN ESSENTIAL FIRST
Technology and social media have afforded us access to wide range of information. There are many stories out there that are based on facts and evidences which are powerful enough to build confidence of the women in technology. For example, contrary to the belief that technology is historically a male-dominated field, there was Elsie Shutt, a woman, who founded the first software business in the US. Shutt formed her business when the time Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both only three years old.
Another example is from the World Economic Forum report saying that many of the pioneers of computer programming were women. In fact, a group of women who fought secretly during World War II, while men went off to fight in various battlefields, were women calculating trajectories and ballistic tables for soldiers and bombardiers in the air. These women were mathematicians or “computers” as they were secretly called. A documentary was created featuring this amazing story.
Even after the war, programming was still an industry dominated by women. When Elsie Shutt founded Computations Inc. or CompInc in 1958, all of her company’s programmers were women. It was only in the 1980s when the once female-dominated field became a field for men due to advertisements highlighting computers as toys for boys.
When Elsie Shutt was asked why she thought so few women were programmers, Shutt explained: “I think if there have been fewer women than men in computing, it’s because they’ve been discouraged back at the education level from majoring in math, or engineering, or computer science.
Mindset plays a very important part in building confidence in a woman that she can be as good as men in the area of technology.
S.T.E.A.M. AS A WAY TO GO
Our call is to revive these times – attracting women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (S.T.E.A.M) as according to a study conducted in the United States, women with STEM jobs earned 33 percent more than comparable women in non-STEM jobs. As a result, the gender wage gap is smaller in STEM jobs than in non-STEM jobs.
We, in the Philippines, include the Arts with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math – the STEM subjects in the educational system in our country. It is an added dimension that makes STEM fun to study.
As we realize the evolution of businesses, the competitive market, and the dynamic behavior of consumers around the world, we see that innovation is the way to go. But what drives innovation? It is creativity – the ability to play with ideas, concepts, and models – an essential in birthing new products and services. It is imperative for entrepreneurs to understand these to put something new to offer and to continuously improve services and product offerings that would pave way to new businesses and industries.
Thus, we see arts as an essential component in building the innovative capacity of economies. Arts induces and sharpens creativity which when combined with logical thinking, can further enhance the entrepreneurial abilities of women and men alike.
According to the same study conducted about STEM, there could be many possible factors contributing to the discrepancy of women and men in STEM jobs. These include: lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields.
These causes are not far from the results of the study conducted by the United Nations (UN) that identifies four overarching factors that impede gender equality in all forms of work and at all levels of development: adverse social norms, discriminatory laws and insufficient legal protections, gender gaps in unpaid household and care work, and unequal access to digital, financial and property assets.
Regardless of the reasons, the findings of these studies emphasize the need for societies to encourage and support women in the said fields.
Hence, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) together with ASEAN Women Entrepreneurs’ Network (AWEN) greatly support events and initiatives that would further our efforts in encouraging women to step up and disrupt the stigma that women are not as equal as men in terms of skills and knowledge in STEM fields.
CHAMPIONING WOMEN IN ASEAN
In the Philippines, it is with pride that I share with you that we are doing better for our women agenda. In fact, in the recent report of the World Economic Forum in terms of Global Gender Gap, we ranked 7th among the 144 countries that were surveyed. This is a good indication that the Philippines’ efforts to improve policies and landscapes for women are being recognized and lauded by economic organizations around the world.
The Philippines is by far the best-performing of the 10 ASEAN members with 79% of gender gap closure. It is also regarded as the only country in the region to make the top 10 globally with its progress on increasing women’s participation in economic and political spheres with a fully closed gender gap on health aspect (WEF, 2015).
These findings motivate us not to stop with our battle to champion women with no reservations.
In the Department of Trade and Industry – Philippines, we have various support services particularly for technology-driven businesses that also allow women to participate in propelling the economy.
We have Slingshot Philippines or Slingshot PH, a government-initiated platform that supports public dialogue and partnership, and helps in building and nurturing an enabling environment with policies and programs for technology and innovation entrepreneurs. With SlingShot Philippines, the government realizes the importance of nurturing an ecosystem and supporting the community by allowing them to convene, discuss, and move mountains through networking and linkages. These will further enable our women. As small businesses integrate and adapt with available technology, they make it work for them by creating virtual spaces – spaces that we believed are more flexible and practical for women. It allows women to provide the necessary work that a company requires without them leaving their homes and duties as a parent.
We also highly encourage women entrepreneurs to seek services available in Negosyo Centers or one-stop shops which cater to the needs of established and potential entrepreneurs.
As the Philippines host the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit this year, the Philippine government works closely and in collaboration with ASEAN Committee on Women (ACW), ASEAN Women Entrepreneurs’ Network (AWEN), and various women organizations, in elevating discussions, building commitments, and establishing a common understanding on various gender issues in the region.
I hope the message here is clear: women are partners for growth and are equally important as men in terms of advancing our economies. It is with technology that our women are more enabled and more empowered in unleashing their potentials and ideas in creating disruptive businesses to the world. As technology further allows women to work while they remain to be the light of their homes for their families, the more that we need to urge young girls of today to seek the fields of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics.
With that, thank you and best wishes!
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under the sun 