News & Events

  The UPOU Office of Gender Concerns is happy to report meeting the mandate of devoting a minimum of 5% of its total budget to gender and development endeavors, for the third consecutive year! The UPOU GAD Accomplishment Report has been reviewed and endorsed by the Philippine Commission on Women on April 14, 2020.  The OGC thanks the UPOU family (all unit leaders, all constituents) for the warm support and participation in working towards achieving goals, projects, and activities that advance gender equality. The work continues, and we are excited to continue working with you!

UPOU-OGC holds seminar on Purpose of Gender Mainstreaming and Management of Resistance to Gender Work The University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) Office of Gender Concerns (OGC) conducted the seminar entitled “Purpose of Gender Mainstreaming and Management of Resistance to Gender Work: Fostering Collaboration Towards Gender and Development” on 12 March 2020 at the UPOU Headquarters AudioVisual Room. Ms. Karen Lagat-Mercado served as the resource speaker. She is the Head of the Municipal Gender and Development Office of Los Banos, Laguna, and a technical Gender and Development (GAD) expert in the Calabarzon Gender and Development Resource Pool. Ms. Lagat-Mercado’s discussion [...]

The UP Open University (UPOU) Office of Gender Concerns (OGC) started the celebration of Women’s Month with a Kick-Off Event on 4 March 2020 at the UPOU Headquarters Main Building Lobby. The program started with a game of charades that showed the actions of the attendees’ associated with being a man and a woman as a warm up. This was followed by a Gender-Bias Bingo that was intended to make the guests reflect on the gender-based biases happening around them.  The Kick-off Program closed by the unveiling of the Freedom Wall.  Everyone was invited to express their thoughts by answering two [...]

OGC Director, Asst. Prof. Rameses De Jesus, and project staff, Shaznay Sumiran, attended the UP System Gender and Development Committee Meeting, held on February 27, 2020 at UP Diliman and attended by Coordinators and representatives of UP gender offices.

The Office of Gender Concerns (OGC) conducted an open discussion about gender issues on February 5, 2020 from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM. The goal of the event is to amplify the conversation about gender-related topics to promote people’s awareness. It also aims to eliminate people’s reservations on asking and learning more about gender, sexuality, and inequality issues. The OGC has previously released information materials about gender equality, the concept of intersectionality, end of violence against women, and the fight against sexual harassment. As people have been exposed to these matters, the event served as a venue to ask their questions [...]

OGC Director, Asst. Prof. Rameses De Jesus, presented his study on Pursuing Gender-Responsive Online Higher Education in the Philippines; representing the UP Open University in the 5th Congress of Asian Association of Women's Studies (AAWS) 2019, Facing New Challenges for Feminisms in Asia: Reiterations, Renewals, and Revisions. The conference was held on December 6-8, 2019 in the Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea. The challenges for feminism in Asia is the focal subject of the 5th Congress of the Asian Association of Women's Studies 2019; with the outlook that asia is a "social and political construct whose geographic boundaries change depending [...]

The UP Open University, led by the Office of Gender Concerns joined Los Baños' Walk to End Violence Against Women (VAW) as part of the 18-day Campaign to End VAW.  The event was organized by the Gender and Development Office of the Municipal Office of Los Baños on November 25, 2019; starting the walk from the Multi-purpose Evacuation Center and ending it in the Municipal Office Building. The event also included an exhibit featuring statistics of cases of VAW, laws against VAW, and visual representations of the numbers of VAW victims and manifestations of VAW.

OGC Director, Asst. Prof. Rameses De Jesus, served as resource speaker for the Mental Health and Gender, during two seminars at the Sandiganbayan. The first seminar was attended by 180 employees of Sandiganbayan, held on 13 November 2019; while the second seminar was attended by 150 employees of Sandiganbayan, held on 21 November 2019.