Bridging Women's Career and Health: A Data-Driven View of Filipino Working Women's Well-being

The Challenge

The Philippines has achieved something remarkable: 43% of senior management positions are held by women—the highest rate in ASEAN and among the top globally according to Grant Thornton's 2023 survey. Filipino women lead in retail (72%), education (63%), and food services (62%). They're breaking barriers, climbing corporate ladders, and reshaping what leadership looks like in Southeast Asia.

But beneath these impressive statistics lies a critical question: Are we taking care of the women who are taking care of our economy?

Leadership gains mean nothing if they're unsustainable. And the data reveals troubling patterns: while women advance professionally, their access to preventive health services lags dangerously behind. The result is a fragile progress—women reaching management positions while facing undetected health risks that could derail their careers and lives.

This capstone project asks: How do women's health and empowerment affect their workforce status and career advancement—and what does this mean for sustaining the Philippines' leadership in gender equity?

Our Approach: Linking Health to Economic Participation

Our Batch 11 capstone group built an integrated analytical framework that does something rarely attempted: connecting women's health data with employment data to reveal how health access influences career outcomes. By bringing together datasets that normally exist in isolation, we created a unified view of working women's realities.

The Integrated Data Framework

We analyzed the intersection of health, empowerment, and economic participation through three major national datasets:

Labor Force Survey (LFS) 2023

  • Employment patterns, working hours, and industry distribution

  • Occupational categories and managerial representation

  • 806,800 working women respondents

Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2022

  • Preventive health service access (breast cancer, cervical cancer, HIV screening)

  • Maternal care (prenatal and postnatal visits)

  • Health insurance coverage and empowerment indicators

ILOSTAT Regional Data

  • ASEAN-level comparisons for gender parity

  • Cross-country leadership benchmarks

  • Regional wage gap analysis

Technical Architecture

Our modern data engineering pipeline unified fragmented government datasets:

Data Collection & Integration

  • Raw LFS, DHS, and ILOSTAT file ingestion

  • Multi-format processing (CSV, XLSX, survey data)

  • Temporal alignment across different data collection periods

Storage & Transformation

  • ClickHouse cloud data warehouse for centralized analytics

  • dbt (data build tool) for standardization: region codes, age groups, PSA occupation/industry mappings

  • Cross-dataset modeling linking health access to employment outcomes

Analytics & Visualization

  • Tableau dashboards showing health-employment correlations

  • Regional disparity mapping across health indicators

  • Industry-level leadership and health access patterns

This reproducible pipeline creates a living analytical system that can be updated as new LFS and DHS data become available, enabling ongoing monitoring of women's health and workforce trends.

Key Findings

Our analysis revealed that Filipino women's remarkable career progress exists alongside troubling health access gaps—creating an unstable foundation for long-term leadership:

1. Women Are Working—But Concentrated in Vulnerable Sectors

The workforce reality:

  • Women comprise 49.85% of the Philippine workforce

  • 63% of working women are married, balancing careers with family responsibilities

  • 74% are aged 25-54—peak career-building years that overlap with peak caregiving demands

  • Average age: 42 years old

Industry concentration:

  • Wholesale & Retail Trade (31%) - often without comprehensive workplace health benefits

  • Agriculture & Forestry (15%) - informal sector with minimal health infrastructure

  • Public Administration (8%) - better benefits but bureaucratic access barriers

These sectors, while providing employment, often lack the comprehensive workplace health programs found in corporate environments—meaning the majority of working women have limited employer-supported health access.

2. Leadership Gains Are Real—But Uneven Across Industries

Where women lead:

  • Wholesale & Retail: 72% of managers are women

  • Education: 63% female management

  • Food Services: 62% female leadership

Where women lag:

  • Transport: 40% - underrepresented in a growing sector

  • Mining & Quarrying: 33% - barely one-third despite industry expansion

  • Construction: 32% - male-dominated despite infrastructure boom

The pattern is clear: women dominate management in traditionally "female" sectors (retail, education, hospitality) but remain underrepresented in high-paying technical and industrial fields. This occupational segregation limits earning potential and concentrates women in sectors with weaker health infrastructure.

3. Health Access Is the Biggest Barrier—And Strongly Predicts Leadership

The screening crisis: Family planning remains the most accessed service among working women, but when it comes to preventive screenings:

  • Women managers are more likely to undergo breast cancer, cervical cancer, and HIV screening than non-managers

  • National crisis indicators:

    • 65% of breast cancer cases are detected late—when treatment is most difficult and survival lowest

    • 12 Filipino women die daily from cervical cancer—a largely preventable disease

    • HIV infections among women continue rising, yet screening remains low

Regional disparities create a two-tier system:

High-access regions (NCR, Caraga, Visayas, Region X, CAR):

  • 38-40% uptake across preventive screenings

  • These regions can serve as benchmarks for raising women's preventive care nationwide

Low-access regions (Eastern Visayas, Davao Region, MIMAROPA, SOCCSKSARGEN):

  • Below 25% screening uptake

  • Women managers are "left behind" with the widest health gaps

  • Represents the biggest opportunity for impact

The correlation: Regions with stronger preventive health access tend to show higher female managerial representation. This isn't coincidental—women with better health access are more likely to stay employed, advance, and lead.

4. The Dual Burden: Career Peak Meets Caregiving Peak

63% of working women are married, and 74% fall in the 25-54 age bracket—the years when career advancement opportunities peak but also when caregiving responsibilities intensify:

  • Young children requiring attention

  • Aging parents needing care

  • Household management falling disproportionately on women

This dual burden affects:

  • Screening uptake: Working women delay health checkups due to time constraints

  • Career continuity: Health issues discovered late force career interruptions

  • Long-term advancement: Untreated health conditions limit sustained leadership capacity

The data suggests that without adequate health support systems, the very years when women should be advancing most rapidly become years when they're most vulnerable to dropping out or plateauing.

5. The Fragility of Progress

The Philippines leads ASEAN in women's management representation—but this leadership is fragile without equitable health access. Consider:

  • A woman reaches management in her 30s-40s

  • She delays preventive screenings due to work and family demands

  • A health condition goes undetected until it's advanced

  • Treatment requires extended leave or career exit

  • Her leadership position is lost, not due to lack of competence, but due to preventable health crisis

This pattern repeats across regions with low health access, undermining decades of gender equity progress. Leadership representation can't be sustained if the women achieving it can't access the healthcare needed to stay healthy and working.

Impact & Recommendations

This integrated health-employment analysis provides actionable intelligence for government agencies, corporate HR departments, women's advocacy organizations, and regional health planners. Our framework enables evidence-based strategies to sustain women's workforce gains.

Core Recommendation Framework

Address the systemic barriers preventing working women from accessing preventive health services—particularly in regions and sectors showing the widest gaps. Rather than treating health and employment as separate policy domains, recognize that sustained workforce participation depends on accessible, appropriate healthcare.

The following recommendations identify what systemic issues must be tackled, not prescriptive solutions—recognizing that effective interventions require stakeholder consultation and context-specific design.

1. Prioritize Health Access in Low-Uptake Regions

The Challenge: Eastern Visayas, MIMAROPA, Davao Region, and SOCCSKSARGEN show screening uptake below 25%—leaving women managers and workers at heightened risk.

What Must Be Addressed:

  • Geographic accessibility barriers: Why women in these regions cannot physically reach screening facilities

  • Service availability gaps: Whether adequate screening infrastructure and trained personnel exist

  • Awareness and cultural factors: What prevents women who could access services from doing so

  • Economic barriers: Whether out-of-pocket costs deter even employed women from seeking care

Interventions must tackle why these regions consistently underperform despite having working women populations comparable to high-access areas.

2. Replicate Success from High-Performing Regions

The Opportunity: NCR, Caraga, Central Visayas, Region X, and CAR achieve 38-40% screening uptake—demonstrating that better outcomes are possible.

What Must Be Understood:

  • Infrastructure factors: What screening facilities, outreach programs, and service delivery models exist in these regions

  • Policy enablers: Whether local government health budgets, public-private partnerships, or employer programs contribute to success

  • Cultural acceptance: How health-seeking behavior is encouraged and normalized in these contexts

Rather than inventing new approaches, scaling what already works in high-performing regions could accelerate progress in lagging areas—but only after understanding what makes those models successful.

3. Address Workplace Barriers to Health Access

The Challenge: 63% of working women are married, 74% are aged 25-54, and most work in sectors without comprehensive health benefits—creating time, financial, and logistical barriers to preventive care.

What Must Be Addressed:

  • Time constraints: How work schedules prevent women from attending screenings during clinic hours

  • Employer support gaps: Why most Philippine workplaces lack health programs beyond PhilHealth

  • Sector disparities: How women in retail, agriculture, and informal sectors have fundamentally different health access than those in corporate environments

  • The dual burden reality: Why women managing both careers and caregiving responsibilities deprioritize their own health

Interventions should address why employment—which provides income and theoretically better access to services—paradoxically creates barriers to actually using preventive care.

4. Build National Women's Health & Workforce Monitoring Systems

The Challenge: Health and employment data exist separately, making it impossible for policymakers to see how health access affects workforce participation and leadership advancement.

What Must Be Developed:

  • Integrated reporting frameworks: Systems that link health service utilization with employment outcomes

  • Regional tracking mechanisms: Monitoring that identifies emerging health access gaps before they widen

  • Evidence-based resource allocation: Data infrastructure enabling targeted health investments in regions and sectors with the greatest need

The goal isn't more data collection—it's creating systems that connect existing data to inform strategic decisions about where health investments will most strengthen workforce participation.

5. Integrate Women's Health into Workforce Development Strategy

The Challenge: Government and corporate workforce development programs focus on skills training, leadership development, and career advancement—treating health as a separate domain rather than a foundational requirement for sustained participation.

What Must Change:

  • Policy integration: Why workforce development agencies don't coordinate with health service providers

  • Corporate retention strategies: How companies can recognize that preventive health support is retention investment, not just benefit expense

  • Long-term planning: Whether national economic development plans account for the relationship between women's health access and labor productivity

Effective strategies must acknowledge that you cannot build a sustainable female leadership pipeline while allowing preventable health crises to derail women's careers.

Why This Matters

The Philippines has achieved something remarkable: 43% of senior management positions held by women, ranking first among 28 countries globally. This didn't happen by accident—it's the result of progressive policies, cultural factors supporting female leadership, and decades of investment in women's education.

But this achievement is fragile. Every year, working women delay cancer screenings because they can't take time off work. Every month, women in low-access regions face preventable health crises that could have been caught early. Every day, talented female managers risk losing careers they worked years to build—not because they lack competence, but because they lack accessible healthcare.

The data shows a clear pattern: Women with better health access are more likely to stay employed, advance, and lead. This means that sustaining the Philippines' leadership in gender equity isn't just about hiring and promoting more women—it's about ensuring the women who reach leadership positions can stay healthy enough to sustain those roles.

The Path Forward

This capstone demonstrates that the technical capability exists to link women's health and employment data, revealing patterns that inform strategic interventions. Our Batch 11 group built a working analytical framework using publicly available datasets and modern data tools.

The question isn't whether we can identify where and how health access affects women's careers—we can, and this project proves it. The question is whether policymakers, employers, and health system leaders will use this intelligence to protect the hard-won gains in women's leadership.

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