Proceedings of The 6th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Measuring the Effectiveness of the Philippine Commission on Women in Mainstreaming Gender to Address VAW in the Philippines’ COVID-19 Pandemic Response
Michelle C. Castillo
ABSTRACT:
Many researches on gender machineries are criticized as fragmented, unsystematic, and utilizing an exclusively state feminism lens, which leads to them being regarded as secondary within the larger field of women’s studies. Moreover, these studies usually focus on using the organization’s structural capacity as a measure of its effectiveness and success, lacking empirical evidence on other factors that can be considered. This study seeks to answer whether the Philippine Commission on Women (PCW) is effective in its role as the national gender machinery, identify what factors affect the organization’s success and, thereby, present an updated method of assessment. Limited within PCW’s gender mainstreaming mandate, this study uses the Policy Frame Analysis to measure how Violence against Women (VAW) as a gender issue was effectively integrated in the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic response of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), and the Attribution Approach to establish whether the level of integration is a result of the actions of the PCW. The study finds that the PCW is moderately effective in influencing DSWD in integrating VAW in its COVID-19 pandemic response and identifies organizational and contextual factors behind this outcome.
keywords: gender machinery, gender mainstreaming, VAW, COVID-19 pandemic, Philippines