Rethinking Women’s Economic Agency in the Philippines

How informal work, visibility, and narrative shape women’s financial power

Initiatives that center on women’s roles as founders and entrepreneurs promote gender equity and break barriers to who can be economic power players. Photo courtesy FoundHer.

Efforts to expand women’s economic participation often rely on familiar benchmarks: counting women-owned businesses, raising general awareness, and documenting systemic barriers. While these high-level indicators offer a starting point, they don't always show what is happening in women's day-to-day lives.

Data from the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) 2024 Social Norms, Attitudes, and Practices (SNAPS) survey in the Philippines offers a much sharper lens. One of its main insights is that predicting whether a woman shares equally in earning her household's income isn't the same as predicting whether she champions gender equality in her personal or public life.

Looking closely at the study highlights three specific areas where economic realities, daily practices, and narratives connect.

Self-Employment: A Surprisingly Loaded Term

The survey looks closely at the relationship between self-employment and whether a woman shares equally in earning household income or making financial decisions. Among the economic factors tested, self-employment showed a negative association with gender-equal income-earning behavior.

Context from the study's validation workshop provides essential perspective: a significant share of self-employed women in the Philippines operate in the informal economy. For many, informal self-employment is driven by constrained options in the formal job market, bringing low income and a lack of formal protections along with it.

Understanding the structural differences between these economic positions helps explain the survey's findings:

• Informal Work: Operating without formal registration often limits access to institutional credit and leaves women without financial protections, insurance, or formal standing.

• Formal Business Ownership: Formal registration opens access to commercial financial institutions and regulatory protections, offering greater baseline stability.

When data aggregates all women business owners into a single figure, it blends low-earning survival ventures with scalable, formal enterprises. The survey points to the lower earnings and lack of protections in informal work as key reasons why self-employment on its own is negatively associated with gender-equal economic outcomes at home.

Gender-Equal Practices Need to Be Mainstreamed

The survey found a statistically significant, positive association between a woman sharing equally in household income and her direct exposure to gender-equal practices.

Specifically, women were significantly more likely to share equally in earning income and making household choices if they:

• Grew up in households where gender-equal norms were practiced.

• Saw gender equality reflected in the media.

• Personally knew women operating outside traditional roles.

These findings suggest that seeing a norm actively lived by someone else is positively linked to daily actions, moving equality from an abstract principle to a practical reality.

Elevating visible role models offers a practical way to reflect these dynamics. Sharing the operational journeys of female founders and leaders creates relatable proof points that demonstrate how women navigate their own economic choices.

Humanize Women’s Agency in Narratives

When measuring advocacy — whether a woman speaks up for gender equality in her private life, household, or community — the survey revealed a nuanced pattern. Exposure to gender-equal media was negatively associated with women's advocacy across two of the three economic domains measured.

Per the study's interpretation, reporting on systemic obstacles is essential for pointing out broken systems and bringing problems to light. However, when media coverage focuses only on the scale of the barrier, it can feel overwhelming — making it seem like speaking up won't actually change anything.

Highlighting women’s agency alongside these obstacles is crucial because it:

• Demonstrates practical navigation: Shows the concrete strategies women use to negotiate, work through, and maneuver through complex constraints in real time.

• Reframes capability and progress: Shifts the narrative from passive endurance of systemic barriers to active decision-making, capability, and economic leverage.

• Sustains efficacy and momentum: Reinforces the belief that individual and collective advocacy can produce meaningful, attainable change.

Communications are often most engaging when they balance diagnostic accuracy with human agency. Pairing information about structural challenges with concrete examples of progress helps sustain motivation and reinforces the idea that change is attainable.

Catalyzing Agency Through Capital

This intersection of formal enterprise, visible proof points, and active agency is where funds like Kerubin Capital operate. Rather than treating women merely as participants in micro-enterprises or beneficiaries of development aid, Kerubin deploys catalytic capital specifically to help female founders scale formal, high-growth businesses. 

By backing women who are actively building in sectors like logistics, fintech, and compliance tech, the fund does more than provide capital; it generates visible, relatable examples of female leadership in action. In doing so, Kerubin operationalizes the survey’s key insight: proving that real economic leverage is unlocked when we move from supporting informal survival work to funding scalable, female-led market agency.

Translating Insights into Practice

The GIWL SNAPS findings offer clear, evidence-based points for consideration:

1. Look Beyond Self-Employment Numbers: Distinguish between informal self-employment and formal business ownership when evaluating economic progress.

2. Recognize the Value of Visibility: Everyday exposure to women in non-traditional roles correlates strongly with equal household decision-making.

3. Balance Structural Challenges with Agency: Narrative messaging stays most effective when it pairs the reality of systemic obstacles with examples of how women actively navigate them.

By grounding discussions in empirical data, stakeholders can better understand the subtle factors shaping women's economic participation and agency in the Philippines.

Source: 

Global Institute for Women's Leadership. Social Norms, Attitudes, and Practices (SNAPS) Survey 2024. Australian National University, 2026.