Women suffer bigger income blow due to COVID-19

Amid the harder times wrought by the pandemic, women in the Philippines suffered the most as their incomes dropped by as much as 86 percent, based on data collected by leading online tax-filing and payment platform Taxumo.

The decline in women’s earnings last year amid the pandemic-induced recession was in line with the trend which saw a 22.8-percent decline in 2020 incomes, reflected by the P11.3 million in taxes remitted through Taxumo to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) during this year’s tax-filing and payment deadline.

Taxumo’s data on the BIR’s 2021 collections were based on 2020 income taxes. In 2020, taxes remitted through Taxumo were a higher P14.7 million, as these were based on earnings in 2019 or before the COVID-19 pandemic shed millions of jobs and trillions in pesos of incomes which pushed the Philippines to its worst postwar recession last year.

The Philippines’ gross domestic product slid 9.6 percent in 2020 as the country remained under the longest and among the most stringent COVID-19 lockdowns in the region.

In March, World Bank vice president for East Asia and Pacific Victoria Kwakwa noted in a blog post that “gender differences in work stoppages widened in Indonesia and the Philippines in the second half of 2020, with women staying at home amid containment measures that restricted mobility and increased childcare responsibilities.”

Across the East Asia and Pacific region, Kwakwa said “women are over-represented in the informal sector … Women also tend to occupy jobs without basic protection mechanisms such as paid sick leave and unemployment insurance, and this means they have no safety net when jobs disappear.”

Unfortunately, “the Philippines lacks a framework that would make it easier for women to find part-time jobs,” Kwakwa said.

Officials of the state planning agency National Economic and Development Authority earlier acknowledged that besides their work and online businesses, some working mothers had to take care of their young children who were attending online classes.

Women in the Philippines also traditionally shouldered the bigger burden of taking care of the elderly and the sick in the family.

On the flip side, Taxumo said Filipinos who were nonbinary or belonging to the LGBTQ community declared incomes which were 52-percent higher than prepandemic levels, as most of them sourced earnings from their businesses.

“Almost 90 percent of nonbinary online taxpayers’ income come from business,” Taxumo chief marketing officer Evan Tan told the Inquirer.

“Compared to nonbinary, income source from business only accounts for 50 percent of the female online taxpayers. Most come from the practice of their profession,” Tan said.

Age could also be a factor why nonbinary taxpayers who paid their dues online had higher declarations than their women counterparts.

Tan said “76.5 percent of nonbinary taxpayers are also from ‘generation alpha’ (born from early 2010) versus women taxpayers (74.7 percent are millennials).”

While Tan said their data was not conclusive, Taxumo deemed that “maybe these older women had less time to focus on their work, unlike the younger nonbinary people who could focus on their businesses.”