Mildred Mercene-Buazon doesn’t mince words when clarifying that gender equity is not about just counting the numbers of women and men present in a room. One first needs to start with appreciating the minority sex. Appreciation is the biggest gap in gender work, says Mercene-Buazon. The roles and contributions of women in fisheries were not fully appreciated, she says, particularly by policymakers. Though they contribute significantly in activities beyond harvesting, they are being counted always in the hemline.
As the Chief Administrative Officer and Vice-Chair of the Gender Focal Point System for the Philippines Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) Central Office, Mercene-Buazon channels further inspiration from another gender specialist: Arlene Jigsz Nietes Satapornvanit. They both worked on the USAID Oceans and Fisheries Partnership, an initiative combatting illegal fishing in Southeast Asia that also supported an electronic traceability system for the Filipino tuna fishery. They worked to address human welfare and gender for the program. One simple method to foster gender awareness, says Jigsz? Feature a woman in their supply chain graphics, which they did.
The Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability (SALT) visited the Philippines in January and February 2020 to gain detailed insight and interview those working on the Philippines’ traceability endeavor with USAID Oceans. While browsing banners in a Manila hotel event room celebrating the program’s close, it appeared women were the majority in Southeast Asia’s fisheries. Upon closer inspection, it was actually a showcase of gender champions who supported equity and empowerment for women in the seafood industry, because female contributions in fisheries have been largely ignored.
With fishing roles in many cultures traditionally reserved for males, more recent concentration on gender equality shows where and how we’ve overlooked women in this field (more stories below). After all, women, too, depend on marine resources for survival, feeding their family, and account for nearly half the fisheries workforce. Without sex-disaggregated data though, it’s challenging to address gender in programs. The often-cited resource from 2012 on women’s contribution to fisheries showing that women are 50% of the workforce illustrates the dearth of gender-specific data. Sex-disaggregated data is missing from more recent reports like FAO’s 2018 State of Fisheries and Aquaculture report, which compiles data from many countries. Not only is the data not collected uniformly through a gender lens, but those numbers also exclude other sectors, like processing or marketing. How do you measure the impact of women in fisheries if there is no data? asks Jigsz.
Thus, USAID Oceans began with a gender analysis in General Santos, the tuna capital of the Philippines, assisted by the National Network on Women in Fisheries in the Philippines, Inc. (WINFISH) with Dr. Marieta Sumagaysay as Project Leader. Carrying out the analysis itself imparted awareness, says Sumagaysay, even with the data collectors themselves who came from Mindanao State University but were not in a gender field. It also helped differentiate where women and men differed in their needs by asking each gender what they perceived other genders needed. Other issues also emerged from the gender analysis. WINFISH, through a grant from USAID Oceans, implemented gender interventions to address them.
2020 SALT