(Dis)empowerment
In an online interview, journalist Karen Davila said, “I believe many women work hard. But I would advise young women listening today, you cannot be an empowered woman kung umaasa ka ng pera sa boyfriend mo o sa asawa mo (if you depend on your boyfriend or husband for money). A truly empowered woman is a financially independent woman.” This fueled a strong debate online, particularly among those who identify as stay-at-home moms, who felt their efforts and contributions were invalidated.
Within the discourse, however, I notice that the term empowerment or empowered was treated as if it were a personality trait or an inner strength. It was also often conflated with value and worth. Thus, it would make sense that if you treat empowerment as an individual trait, being told that you were disempowered would feel like being accused of a personal flaw.
What is empowerment, and what contributes to being empowered?
From a community psychology lens, psychologist Julian Rappaport described empowerment as about helping those with less than their fair share of power to understand their own situation and gain more power. Empowerment has many layers: individual, psychological, community, and societal, among others. Individual empowerment is akin to self-efficacy, which is a belief in one’s capacity and ability. We can experience ourselves having control and mastery over our lives and trust in our capacity to solve our problems. However, self-efficacy alone is not sufficient for empowerment. Believing in oneself is not always enough for us to change our lives. We can be doing the best we can and put in as much effort as we can, and still find ourselves unable to control a situation. For example, a mother who cares for her children and budgets as much as she can so as to put away some emergency funds can demonstrate high self-efficacy or feel individually empowered. However, especially in this economy as of late, we find that no amount of budgeting will get us to the financial safety net we need. A 2025 study shows that 64 percent of Filipino families cannot afford a P10,000 hospital bill out of pocket without borrowing money or relying on insurance. Moreover, only 9 percent of families can cover a P100,000 bill, 6 percent can cover up to P300,000, and just 4 percent can cover bills exceeding P300,000 without health insurance. Health emergencies can instantly destroy financial security.
Empowerment, therefore, is not something that is just individually derived. First, we need to be aware of where we have power and where we lack it. Power is not always dependent on one’s effort. One can have unearned power, such as in generational wealth or by being born to a privileged class (or having a powerful passport). We can also gain more power, via education, increasing our skills, or marrying someone with more power, to name a few. We can also benefit from someone else’s power and lend our power to others. We can use power to empower others; we can also use power to attain more power for ourselves.
Money facilitates power, but other things can, too. Power is essentially the ability to influence outcomes. Powerful families, for example, can directly influence policy. Powerful people can shield themselves from criminal liability. When power is concentrated among the few, then those few families have an outsized say on everyone else’s lives. When power is more evenly distributed, such as in an ideal democracy, then we have a greater chance of influencing not just our own lives but our community’s well-being.
Being a woman can put us immediately in a disempowered position, through gender-based norms and expectations. For example, eldest daughters are commonly expected to take care of their aging parents. A married woman is faced with multiple constraints: our family code gives the husband primacy in disagreements regarding common property and the upbringing of their children. Even when both parents are working, the mental load of running the household still falls on the women. A colleague shared the results of their research showing that regardless of the configuration of gender and sexuality, women—whether straight or queer—have the worst mental health outcomes. He was surprised; I was not.
To acknowledge Karen Davila’s point, pursuing financial independence or the capacity to support yourself helps to empower women. Money or having a job alone does not guarantee empowerment, but it certainly helps. What she expressed, while it may not have been easy to hear, is a necessary component of empowerment: awareness of where we lack power. Empowerment doesn’t always feel good; power and responsibility go hand-in-hand, after all. There are multiple factors contributing to our empowerment. We can also feel empowered in one context and deprived of power in another.
Let’s not treat (dis)empowerment as a personal trait. Instead, let us work on redistributing power so that it is freeing for all and not just for a few.
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