The Center for Women’s Resources (CWR) challenged the portrayal of digital integration and artificial intelligence (AI) as automatic pathways to progress for Filipino women, as ASEAN economic ministers signed the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) in Manila on 14 November 2026.
CWR warned that DEFA, alongside President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s Executive Order No. 131 establishing the National Artificial Intelligence Council (NAIC), risks reinforcing corporate control, precarious labor, surveillance, and the exploitation of women’s labor.
While ASEAN and the Philippine government promote DEFA to attract investments, expand markets, and accelerate economic growth through digital trade and emerging technologies, CWR stressed that digital integration does not guarantee decent jobs, better livelihoods, or economic security for women.
“DEFA promises seamless digital markets, while EO 131 promises ‘responsible AI.’ But for Filipino women, both can mean more work, less security, and greater corporate control,” said Cham Perez, CWR executive director. “A woman may sell online or work through an app, yet remain without a living wage, job security, health insurance, maternity protection, or the right to organize. This is not digital empowerment. It is the digitization of exploitation.”
Digitalization must not deepen women’s labor exploitation
Filipino women are concentrated in sectors undergoing rapid digital restructuring, including retail, services, business process outsourcing (BPO), care work, home-based production, and platform-based work. While digital platforms offer income opportunities, they also shift business risks onto workers through unstable earnings, lack of benefits, invasive surveillance, customer harassment, arbitrary account deactivation, and unpredictable working hours.
These conditions reflect a broader pattern in which technological innovation is increasingly used to reorganize labor in ways that prioritize corporate efficiency and profitability over workers’ rights and welfare. Rather than freeing women from economic insecurity, digitalization can intensify existing inequalities by making their labor more flexible for employers while making their livelihoods more precarious.
In CWR’s Ulat Lila (Purple Report) of 2026, data show that more than 20 million women are economically insecure because of low income, limited opportunities for livelihood, and insecure work. Against this backdrop, the expansion of digital markets cannot be treated as an indicator of women’s economic empowerment. When corporations benefit from women’s labor without guaranteeing living wages, decent working conditions, and social protection, digitalization risks reproducing and further entrenching the very inequalities it claims to address.
For women in the informal economy, the barriers to meaningful digital inclusion are even more pronounced. Poverty, the high cost of digital devices, inadequate internet infrastructure, and limited access to technological resources constrain their ability to participate in the digital economy. Market vendors, home-based producers, online sellers, freelancers, and platform workers need affordable connectivity, secure payment systems, protection from excessive platform fees, and decent working conditions. Without these safeguards, digital integration will only benefit corporations and the financially connected, further marginalizing poor and rural women.
Need for accountability of AI, digital platforms
CWR warned that EO 131 should not be another government initiative that prioritizes technological innovation and investment, while neglecting the risks of displacement, algorithmic management, surveillance, and discrimination for women workers.
Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly being deployed to track productivity, assign tasks, set pay, screen applicants, and limit access to jobs and services. Without transparency and accountability, these systems can reinforce gender, class, and disability discrimination.
“An algorithm that decides who gets work, how much a worker is paid, or who gets deactivated is not neutral technology. It is a management tool that serves whoever controls it,” Perez said. “The government must protect women whose lives and livelihoods are increasingly subjected to algorithmic control.”
CWR also warned against treating women’s privacy and online safety as secondary concerns in the rush toward digital trade. The collection and monetization of women’s personal data by corporations and platforms can intensify surveillance, discrimination, and technology-facilitated violence, including harassment, stalking, image-based abuse, and deepfakes.
A digital economy for women, not for corporations
CWR calls on the Marcos Jr. administration to reject a model of digital integration and AI governance that prioritizes big business, foreign investors, and technology corporations over workers and the public.
“Women workers demand living wages, decent working conditions and security of tenure for workers in digital, service, retail, BPO and platform-based sectors. All workers, including informal, freelance, home-based and platform workers, should have access to universal social protection, including health insurance, maternity benefits, pensions and income support, irrespective of their employment status,” said Perez.
CWR also called for regulation of digital platforms and artificial intelligence systems to prevent wage theft, excessive fees, unreasonable working hours, arbitrary deactivation, invasive surveillance and discriminatory algorithmic decisions. The government must also guarantee affordable internet and devices, gender-responsive digital literacy programs, and meaningful support for women-led small enterprises.
CWR stressed that ASEAN’s digital future must not be measured by investment figures, corporate profits, or projections of a US$2-trillion regional digital economy, but by whether women workers enjoy decent wages, secure livelihoods, social protection, and freedom from exploitation.
“Filipino women do not need another trade agreement or AI council that treats them as cheap and flexible labor. They need living wages, secure jobs, social protection, safe digital spaces, and the power to organize,” Perez noted. “Technology must serve the people, not corporate profit at the expense of women’s labor and rights. Anything less is not inclusion. It is exploitation,” concluded Perez.
