femalenetwork.com

Life used to be a scene out of “Pleasantville”—an intact nuclear family with Mom, Dad, brother and sister, maybe with a family dog. Mom was the homemaker and Dad, the breadwinner. And the kids? Well, they were either in school—just about to finish high school or college—or were already beginning to head off towards the “real world” and be part of the labor force.

These days, it’s not quite like that. While some families still live that way, more have become dual-earning families where both husband and wife are the breadwinners. Other families have only the female partner as the breadwinner. Sometimes, the working children take on that role.

Women as Heads of the Family
Sources like ACTIONAID, a global non-government agency, say that in developing countries like the Philippines, more and more women take on the role of breadwinner for many different reasons. But almost always, most women are not breadwinners by choice. They are thrust into the role and are unprepared to take on the responsibility of earning the money for the family.

“I didn’t know the concept of a ‘breadwinner’. My dad worked and my mom stayed at home,” says Marie, then a freelance writer. “So the concept of being the head of the family was pretty alien [to me] until my dad suddenly became very ill and had to go on disability.” This was in the mid-80s. Marie was just about to finish college at the University of the Philippines. The rest of her family, including her father, were then living in the United States. In the late 1980s, Marie’s father died. That event came with the realization that aside from losing a father, they had also lost their family’s income earner. “I was a fresh grad,” Marie recalls, “and had four siblings in school in the US: three in college and one in high school! A college education in the US is no joke.”

It was also during the late-80s, recalls Jan, a radio producer, when her father succumbed to naso-pharyngeal cancer. At that time, she had just been out of college for a year. Her two brothers were still in school (one in college and the other in sixth grade). Their mother had never worked in all her life. They learned about her father’s cancer too late—it was already in the advanced stages when they found out. By that time, he only had a few more months to live. “I was in a panic,” she says. “Because I didn’t really have a stable job yet. I was already working but I was still in that stage when I wanted to try out different things before I would finally settle down in a real, long-term job. I was still finding myself.”

As her surname suggests, Rosalie Manalo is a winner in every sense. She’s a production manager for a music channel, squeezing freelance jobs in between shoots, making good money and making me green with her amazing time management skills. She’s got a husband and a kid and the hyper-extended families that come with them. But ask her where she’s putting her money and you get the usual response: “I put it in a savings account, so that I’m liquid during emergencies.” Credit cards? “I keep three, but rarely use them, except during emergencies,” she smiles. She tried her hand at direct selling once, but her sense of pity kept her from profiting from her fledgling business. “I did it to break even. Nadadaan kasi ako masyado sa awa,” she says.

Me-ann (not her real name) has the same dilemma. Recently, her landlord confronted her for reneging on rent payments for weeks. “I loaned the money to friends, and so I ended up not having enough for myself,” she says, half-amused. The Gaiea instinct at work here. And so, Me-ann did the next best thing: she borrowed money from friends. “I realize it’s a cycle every pay day—I have to pay my debts,” she rues.

Ask any feisty, independent-minded woman about her money, and chances are she will smile and say: I’ve got enough of it to live even without my man. Or: I have my own home business. I’ve got it all covered.

Then ask her again fifty or so years later, when the statistics are once more proven right, and her man dies 8.5 years before she does. Chances are, she will smile and say: At least I still get to eat three times a day.

No Money, No Honey
Ah, women. Ah, money. They elicit the same reaction: either one of disgust or enchantment. Women are to money like fish is to water. Like they say, no money, no honey. The husband remitting the salary to the wife, slashing a little of it for the requisite toma with the barkada, is the stuff of vintage Pinoy domestic lore. No one else is better equipped to handle money than women. Back in the ‘60s, my mother could stretch her 50 centavos into a bayong-ful of meat, vegetables, and bananas, due to her amazing bargaining powers.

But our culture has also made aggressors out of our men in more ways than one. Men are much more familiar with ever-changing modes of wealth generation than women, and only recently have we begun to keep up.

The comely honey, in fact, has no money, has not been taught to make money. Ask her if she can tell a stock from a bond, and she might end up joking about James Bond.

It’s almost a 007-dominated, all-male floor show in the stock exchanges of the world, with countless housewives and career women as audiences. Indeed, women have been receivers of what they ought to be giving, and givers of thankless sweet little gestures that are cruelly stricken out of the gross national income by a transnational preoccupation with outward appearances.

There is a curious bit of trivia that reflects how we handle money. Did you know that the Philippines is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, consumer of shampoos sold through sachets? Apparently, this is the only place where 60% of the people prefer to shell out a few coins a day for shampoo rather than commit the full P50 for a bottle. Of course, it doesn’t matter that in the end they will end up paying 20% more for the same number of shampoos because of higher packaging costs on the sachet. The point is they do not sacrifice and save enough to make the one-time investment in the bottle so they end up spending more in the long-run. Ridiculous, but true.

Filipinos are not savers at heart. There are many historical reasons why this could be true—lack of confidence in banks following bank failures in the 70s, the erosion of the value of money through devaluation or inflation or even the lack of availability of savings products that are accessible to everyone. On a more personal level, there are also some cultural reasons that we do not save that much, such as the knowledge that family and friends are always there to fall back on. The fiesta mentality has also been ingrained in us such that we feel the need—and the social pressure—to blow savings or a bonus on grand occasions such as a first month anniversary with a new boyfriend, the baptism of a sixth child or the graduation of a niece from prep. True, it is indeed a great and enviable gift to be able to take joy and celebrate all these little victories. But given that the average annual income of a Filipino family, should we really be spending as much as we do?

Consider the present environment. The situation is somewhat less than ideal, to put it mildly, and nobody can really say when the much-awaited great economic recovery will finally hit. In the meantime, gas prices are soaring and electricity and telephone rates are expected to follow. Add to that the bills from the modern day necessities, such as cellular phones, internet accounts, and monthly highlighting of the hair, and you have on big headache for the consumer.

But then, it may not be completely our fault. Perhaps it also boils down to the fact that the average person in this country does not earn enough to cover his or her needs—even the most basic. With the rising costs of goods and services usually outpacing salary adjustments, a gainfully employed Filipino may not be inclined to place savings in the list of his priorities.

So what is a person to do to avoid financial ruin? The first step is to assess how fiscally responsible you are about saving for a rainy day. Like an alcoholic, you have to accept and acknowledge if you are a financial time bomb. Then, make you financial gameplan: