Women today have broken the granite ceiling

My Father taught us to be strong, decisive and honest. “Don’t do to others what you don’t want others to do unto you” is his shared wisdom to me and to my two other sisters. I am the eldest of three, graduated as an Engineer and a graduating student under Masters in Management major in Engineering Management and currently working for 7 years now to my own Construction Firm. As the only woman in a group of ten per house construction project, I need to be strong, ready to lead and with firm decision making in terms of the implementing rules with regards to scope of work and quality of each project down to the details of each designs.

As the designer of the house with a structural and architectural plan to follow, my role is not to satisfy the client’s need or specification but to exceed their expectation. Total quality management is our objective for every work that will only achieved with a contribution of manpower and upper management. Together the result is overwhelming.

My mom was a kindergarten teacher for 15 years. She was well loved by her peers with a ready smile for every glance. She loves to teach, taught me how to dance and told us to be the best for all the things we are going to do. When the typhoon Ondoy wrecked everything, I used social media for supports and my classmates in school for donations of anything we could give to the fatalities. That was weeks of picking up old clothes from different towns, received diapers from my classmates and a stock of computer monitors from the artist I helped at the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Designs in Manila. I wonder how can those computer monitors could help those people in need of food, so I asked my friends if they would accept the monitor as an art souvenir in exchange of a sack of rice. At the end we got 98 paper bags with full of rice and clothes for one town at Bay, Laguna where the typhoon Ondoy hit most in this province.

When I became aware about the House bill number 4244 or the Reproductive Health Bill, I supported it right a way, I made a social media page where all advocates could share their thoughts and current information about the progress of the bill. We educate one another and even we are all from different parts of this nation, we have a common ground to discuss everything. The group from the page became a group outside the page when I asked all members who could attend for a meet up to do a possible event about the youth awareness. I conducted the meeting in Manila and from there the event “RH:Through the eyes of the youth” was organized with the objective of telling to everyone that the voice of the youth must be heard especially on the issue of the Reproductive Health. On May this year, student leaders from different schools, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender leaders (LGBT) and youth leaders attended the event that last for more than 4 hours.

In Philippines, The population is more or less 95 million and majority is living under the poverty line. I live in Calauan, Laguna where from 54,000 people became 70,000 due to the relocation site from the government program. The National Housing Authority is located in Barangay Dayap which doesn’t have enough manufacturing companies that could give job to the relocates. In between March and April 2010 I did a Free call center training to those attendees from different barangays and jobs to those who are qualified and for this year 2011, just this July, I did another Call Center orientation at Victoria, Laguna. People need to have skills to have jobs. A certain job might not be for everyone but giving them skill through this kind of seminars and orientation could give them an edge in applying for work.

In this decade, we saw a woman president, a woman general, the first woman speaker of the house, a woman pilot and a lot of empowered women in mans field. Long gone were those house wife who are just waiting for their husband after work, long gone were those women who would just agree to the opposite sex for his desires and long gone were those women, daughters, mothers who are just quiet and never speak their minds. Today, women are the source of strength, fighting for every right. Women are empowered now. You can see them in the tallest building as the head of one organization. We have broken the granite ceiling, what men can do we can do it too.

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