May 17, 2006 at 5:25 pm

A NEW study on consumer spending reports that women across Asia-Pacific countries, especially the Philippines, have made great progress in achieving socioeconomic parity with men.

MasterCard International, which conducted the study for its 2006 MasterIndex of Women’s Advancement, says this progress towards income parity is evidenced by the increase in spending among Asian women consumers.

Women in the Philippines, the report says, show the closest indication of achieving parity with their male counterparts, posting a score of 90.9 out of a 100-percent-equality grade.

The MasterIndex of Women’s Advancement measures the socioeconomic level of women in relation to men using a composite of four key indicators: The ratio of female to male participation in the labor force and tertiary education, based on official statistical data; and female and male respondent perceptions of whether they hold managerial positions and earn above median income, which are derived from a survey.

While the 2006 scores for the statistics-based indicators mostly remain unchanged from those of the last year, there were huge spikes in scores for the perception-based indicators, resulting in the overall increases in parity scores.

For the Philippines, for example, much more women this year reported themselves to be holding managerial positions; the score for that parity indicator shot up to 129.03, from the 65.06 in 2005, and thus pushing the overall parity score.

Following the Philippines in the overall parity scores are women in Australia (89.07), Thailand (85.56), and Singapore (84.02).

“The women’s segment continues to grow in importance,” said MasterCard International’s Georgette Tan on the report’s launch.

Overall, says MasterCard, there is a region-wide trend in Asia of a rise in women consumers. “Women’s role as a consumer is changing because their role as a producer has been changing,” says the report. As more women receive post-secondary education and enter into professional careers, the report says, they pursue more active and economically independent lives.
MasterCard says women in “affluent Asia” spent US$290 billion in 2005; by 2015, they will spend US$350 billion. In “emerging Asia,” meanwhile, women spent US$110 billion last year, and are projected to log in US$190 billion in “discretionary spending” by 2015.

“This is a powerful trend that will shape the consumer markets of Asia in the next 10 years,” the report says.

“Affluent Asia” includes Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. China, India, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand comprise “Emerging Asia.”

Women across societies commonly have lower purchasing power than men. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) has noted that, “While women very often work as hard as — or harder than — men, much of their work is of the unpaid kind that does not yield remuneration.” Such “assymetry” in incomes, said the UNDP, exists in most, if not all, existing societies.

In the Philippines, the UNDP estimates that the ratio of female earned income to male earned income is 0.59.

In general, it is indeed personal consumption that has consistently shored up the Philippine economy. In its latest Development Outlook for the Philippines, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) noted that the largest contributor to the country’s GDP growth last year was personal consumption expenditure, buoyed, in turn, by remittances from overseas workers.

The MasterCard report does not describe geographical and demographic characteristics of the sample respondents covered in the survey. It notes, however, that the increase in consumer spending among women is running parallel to rapid urbanization.

MasterCard produces other research in the Asia-Pacific region, including on travel and consumer confidence.