When we opened this conference yesterday, President Fidel V. Ramos proclaimed that it would be impossible for any government to solve population issues and attain social and sustainable development without the equal and equitable participation of women.

In identifying Asia as the "Colossus of the 2lst Century," President Ramos also affirmed that women will play a special role within our cultures and our societies as agents of growth and change, and that the ultimate test of our humanity and of our own societies is our ability to share rights privileges, and responsibilities of decision-making with our women.

Today, with the approval of the Manila Resolution on Women, Gender, Population and Development, we have taken another decisive step in his growing and booming region of the Asia and Pacific area, but where there are also so many islands of poverty and misery towards institutionalizing into the legislative agenda of our respective parliaments.

We affirm in this document that women's empowerment remains the key to population and social development, and that the partnership between men and women is paramount to the success of population programs. I believe that we have to reassure the Asian men that what we want here is not reverse discrimination, but rather a balanced relationship of gender equity between men and women, not based on inferiority or superiority, but based on respect and dignity of the human person.

We also reassert our conviction that regardless of the diversity of our cultural, religious, political and economic conditions, we can still forge a common consensus as to how to address basic human issues and human rights and responsibilities.

This evening, we close this meeting of nearly fifty parliamentarians from sixteen countries securing the thought that political leaders from the Asian and Pacific region will continue to lead the global parliamentarians' movement in ensuring that the last three decades of the women's struggle for equality and equity have not been in vain.

While we congratulate ourselves for a job well-done and for being in the mainstream of international and regional initiatives, let me inject a note of sobriety to our gathering this afternoon by saying that, while we look forward in anticipation to the so called "Century of Women," we should stop looking at women only in the context of the future.

I submit that women have always plays a central role in human development, but humanity has always been unable to acknowledge this reality because we have been trapped in a gender-biased prism of development that tended to view women's contributions in gender stereotypes.

During the First Industrial Revolution in 1 8th Century Europe and 1 9th Century America, this was indeed the industrial revolution of men because the world needed men since they possessed the muscles to operate the engines of industry -- I would say the muscles and the brain, of course, to operate the engines of industry -- machines and other equipment and tools that women were not able to physically to operate.