ABAD, MEANWHILE, doesn’t contest the notion that Filipino men are “babied” from cradle to grave. She has trouble, however, in accepting that this is endemic to the Filipino culture alone.

	BOYS are given less chores than girls, which make it easier for females to adjust more easily to the demands of the workplace. [photo by Jaileen F. Jimeno]

“Don’t blame us (Filipinos), we did not invent it,” she says. “Worldwide, the preference is males.” She points out that this can be gleaned in countries like Italy, in one-child-per-family China, and in India, where there have been numerous cases of women terminating their pregnancies if the unborn child is female.

In any case, the “favored status” of boys also came up in Project Y2001, which was commissioned by the Global Filipino Foundation and the Ateneo de Manila University. Done in 2001, the study even warned: “Spoiled in their teens, they may not grow up into responsible fathers.” (See sidebar) It then advised the Jesuits, who run the Ateneo, to “review and re-direct traditions and beliefs” in bringing up boys to curb the number of those who grow up as “spoiled brats.” (Ateneo’s grade school and high school divisions remain exclusively for boys.)

NFO-Trends, an independent research group, did the study. Over the course of three weeks, it interviewed 1,420 males and females aged seven to 21 from all economic classes nationwide. About 47 percent of the interviewees were male while the rest were female.

Project Y2001’s results validated the stereotype that boys are more favored than girls in the Filipino household. Males have fewer responsibilities while females take on more duties and responsibilities at home, it said. The boys enjoy more freedom from parental control while the girls are cocooned, as parents are more strict and protective of them. While the boys spend more time with their barkada or peers after school, the girls tend to keep to the school-home route, with no other destination in between. Not surprisingly, the study reaffirmed findings of previous researches that girls mature ahead of the boys, who tend to be more playful. It added that the males are irreverent while females are more concerned with pleasing their parents. The pampered males are usually given tasks that are short-term in nature while the females are assigned responsibilities that require patience and focus.

“Girls are trained to be surrogate homemakers by taking care of their younger siblings, doing the laundry, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, cooking and marketing,” reported Project Y2001. “The boys are assigned fewer responsibilities which are usually those expected of a male, such as gardening, feeding the pets, fetching water and running errands.” (The study did cite two high school boys from upper-class families in Metro Manila who said the chores assigned to them would help them become independent grownups.)

The arrangement is apparently not accepted wholeheartedly by all the girls. Grumbled one female interviewee who was a high school senior at the time of the study: “Kami raw ang babae, so, kami ang magtrabaho sa bahay (They say we should handle the domestic chores because we are girls).” Yet while it could be expected that just 49 percent of the boys said it is okay for them to do housework, only 58 percent of the girls gave the proposal a thumbs up.

Interestingly, many of the boys appeared territorial when it came to tasks that are considered “manly.” While 33 percent of the girls said they would want to learn woodwork and carpentry at school, only 18 percent of the boys gave the suggestion a nod. About 18 percent of the girls also wanted to be encouraged to be electricians, plumbers, or car mechanics, but only 13 percent of the boys supported the idea.

ANOTHER PROJECT Y2001 finding that could help explain the weakening grip of males on many jobs is that females are more academically inclined than the males. According to the study, too, while the combined responses from the girls and boys yielded lack of finances (61 percent) as the biggest reason for quitting school, among the top factors cited by male respondents were lack of interest (23 percent) and non-acceptance, poor academic performance, and bad conduct (nine percent). For females, the most common reason for not continuing their education was because they were either getting married or had gotten pregnant (23 percent).

Five years later, here’s the BLES study pointing to one big factor that shrink most of our men’s chances at juicy positions in the workplace: education. Only ten percent, or one out of 10 employed Filipino men finished college, while 20 percent of employed Filipino women did, it says. Aside from that, of the 12.8 million women working in 2006, 32.8 percent had some college education, or one in three. Meantime, of the 20.156 million men employed, only one out of five reached college.

Mercy Abad says she is thankful that while the norm for girls in her generation was to go to finishing school (in preparation for marriage) right after high school, her educated parents worked hard so that all six of their children, daughters and sons alike, could earn college degrees.

Abad says there is one currently developing factor that may somehow change the environment in which boys and girls are raised: the dwindling number of households with maids. She says a recent survey by TNS-Global shows that only 10 percent of Filipino homes today have household help, down from the previous 80 percent.

“Good household helps are now hard to come by, so boys and men are now given assignments in managing the household,” she comments. And with the advent of washing machines and other tools that make housework easier, many parents simply abandon the search for maids and require family members to pitch in and help with the chores.

Abad also says, “Women are now more assertive. The girlfriends train their boyfriends to lessen their dependence on women. Some even have prenuptial agreements on household chore assignments.”

And that, she says, is a far cry from the experience of the women from her generation who “relied on novenas or simply suffered silently,” waiting for their husbands to grow up and mature – hopefully before their children did.