Transcription
The birth rate in the Philippines isn't just declining; it's falling off a cliff. And if you find that surprising, because normally that kind of headline is reserved for countries like South Korea or Japan, you're not alone. Honestly, before I started researching this topic, I assumed the Philippines was doing just fine. Because think about what the Philippines is known for globally. A country so Catholic, it's one of only two places on Earth where divorce is still completely illegal. One of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in all of Asia. Sex tourism, unfortunately. A young, fast-growing population that demographers were actually counting on to be one of Southeast Asia's great economic engines for the next 30 years. That was supposed to be the story. That was the assumption.
But here's the number that might make you think twice. As you know, the replacement rate is 2.1, meaning you need at least 2.1 babies per woman to keep the current population where it's at. Well, as of 2026, the average Filipino woman is having 1.7 children in her lifetime. But before you go, "Yeah, but why are you talking about the Philippines when Japan's birth rate is way lower at like 1.2 and South Korea has completely fallen off the cliff at 0.8?" Actually, South Korea's rate has slightly recovered since hitting rock bottom, but still hasn't crossed back above one. That's a whole other topic.
The reason we need to look into what's happening in the Philippines is the speed at which the birth rate is falling. Just over 30 years ago, in 1993, the average Filipino woman was having 4.1 children in her lifetime. Even as recently as 1998, it was still 3.9, which was slightly concerning, but not super alarming. But then what happened? Boom. It crashed to 2.7 by 2017 and then 1.7 by 2025. That's a 37% collapse in under a decade and the sharpest rate of decline the Philippines has ever recorded and one of the fastest declines anywhere in the world. Certainly a hell of a lot faster than anyone predicted for a country starting from such a high baseline. So, it's fair to say that something didn't gradually shift. Something just snapped.
And at the center of it is a viral meme on Philippine social media among Gen Z Filipinos that most of the outside world has probably never heard of. It's called NBSB, which stands for no boyfriend since birth. There's also the male equivalent, which is NGSB or no girlfriend since birth. Before you start equating this to some feminist movement in the West, I can tell you there are so many cultural and socioeconomic factors at play here that are unique to the Philippines. But by the end of this video, you'll find that the parallels to your own society are harder to ignore than you think. And if you're someone who's still under the impression, thanks to the mainstream media-driven narrative, that the world's biggest problem is overpopulation and that there are too many people, well, the data is telling a very different story. This is not just a Filipino issue. It's happening on a global scale and you're about to find out why.
Before we dive in, I often get asked how we are able to do such deep research across so many Asian countries. And honestly, it takes a lot more than just Googling things or asking AI tools like ChatGPT. Sometimes you need to travel, speak with locals directly and understand the real context on the ground. And whenever I travel for research, one tool I always use is CyberGhost VPN, the sponsor of today's video. CyberGhost encrypts 100% of your internet traffic and reroutes it through secure servers in over 100 locations, which means no one, not even CyberGhost themselves, can see what you're doing online. This becomes especially important when you're on public Wi-Fi in airports, cafes, or hotels. Some of the easiest places for your data to get intercepted. But with CyberGhost turned on, everything is protected inside a secure encrypted tunnel. CyberGhost is already trusted by more than 38 million users worldwide and has thousands of excellent reviews on Trustpilot. Another reason I use it all the time is flexibility. Since our research often involves accessing local news sites, platforms, and region-specific content across Asia, CyberGhost lets me change my virtual locations instantly in just a couple of clicks. So, even if content is geo-restricted in the country I'm currently in, I can still access the information I need. And as a bonus, CyberGhost also unlocks content from more than 40 streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus with different libraries depending on the country you connect through. It works on all major devices and lets you protect up to seven devices at the same time, which is super useful when traveling with multiple devices. Right now, CyberGhost is offering our viewers 84% off plus four extra months for free. All backed by a 45-day money-back guarantee. So, you can try it completely risk-free. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description to get the special offer and start protecting your online privacy.
All right, let's get back into it. So, when one of our Filipino reporters first told me about this whole NBSB phenomenon among Gen Z Filipinos, my immediate reaction was one of confusion, like "no boyfriend or girlfriend since birth." What does that mean? Are they virgins who cannot find partners? Are they saying this with a sense of pride, like they're choosing to be single, or they want to get a boyfriend and girlfriend, but they cannot? Or does that mean that they're just not interested in serious relationships like getting married but are fine with casual hookups? I had so many questions, including about its origins, because the way I see it, understanding where NBSB came from might actually provide some clues as to how the Philippines was able to achieve one of the highest birth rates in the world that peaked at over seven children per woman in the early 1950s. Let's also keep the focus specifically on the "no boyfriend since birth" trend among young Filipino women because honestly, that's where the more unexpected story is. I promise I will also address the male side, "no girlfriend since birth," which is a little bit more predictable, but I will get to that later and tie everything together.
From our research, the NBSB movement dominating Filipino social media right now is really about intentional singlehood. That's the version going viral on TikTok and YouTube where young Filipino women are proudly announcing that they are NBSB not because they cannot find someone, but because they don't need to, that they are happily single, focused on self-love. And this isn't just a loud minority of women online either. A 2026 nationwide survey by a Philippine market research firm found that 68.5% of single Filipinos describe themselves as single by choice. This is an interesting turn of events for the Philippines because, as it turns out, the term "no boyfriend since birth" has been around for a while in Filipino popular culture, but used to mean something very different. You can trace its origin to the mid-2000s where the term first appeared on Filipino internet forums, places like Pinoy Exchange, which was basically the Reddit of the Philippines at the time, where Filipinos discussed everything from politics to relationships. And it started out as self-deprecating Filipino internet slang that young people used to describe themselves. Basically, the Filipino version of "forever alone." In fact, as recently as 2015, there was literally a Filipino movie that year called "No Boyfriend Since Birth," starring two of the country's most popular actors at the time. The plot is about a 26-year-old woman desperately trying to escape her NBSB status by winning over a high school crush because for her, getting married was the natural next step in life, and she wanted it to be with the person she had always loved. That's what NBSB meant in 2015. That's some proud statement of intent, just an incomplete chapter in life.
So what's changed since then? To answer that, or at least recognize similar patterns, we actually have to go back much further than the mid-2000s. And when I say "we have to go back," I'm talking more than 460 years, which is twice the age of the United States as a country in existence. That's so far back that the Spanish hadn't even arrived in the Philippines yet, because remember, the Philippines was colonized by Spain from 1565 to 1898. So we're talking about the 1500s and earlier. At that point, the Philippines wasn't even a unified country. It was a scattered collection of island communities and tribal settlements with a total population of somewhere around 1 million people spread across more than 7,000 islands. To put that in perspective, the Philippines today has 117 million people. That pre-colonial population was less than 1% of what it is now.
And here's what I found rather fascinating about this period. Those early Filipinos actually had attitudes towards relationships, sexuality, and family size that looked remarkably similar to what Gen Z Filipinos are gravitating toward today. Turns out, the collection of Filipino island communities and tribes were led mostly by women who held significant social, moral, and spiritual authority. There was this class of female spiritual leaders or shamans called the Babaylan. I believe I'm pronouncing it correctly, Babaylan, who were essentially the doctors, priests, and community leaders of their time. These women were basically equal in status to the tribal chiefs. The female leadership created more autonomy and agency for women in everyday life, which directly translated into an open attitude towards female sexuality and birth control practices. Here are some examples. Being a virgin before marriage was actually looked down upon in pre-colonial Filipino society. There was even a belief that a woman who had never been with a man would have difficulty reaching the afterlife. That's how different the value system was.
But the whole women's autonomy went well beyond attitude towards sex. According to the Boxer Codex, a late 16th-century Spanish colonial manuscript that documented Filipino customs, abortion was practiced almost universally. It was carried out by female specialists using massage, herbal medicines, and a stick to physically force the pregnancy to end before birth. It gets worse. Infanticide, which is the deliberate killing of a baby that had already been born alive, was also commonly practiced and socially accepted in those communities. How? The historic records don't go into graphic detail, but one documented method was simply abandoning newborns out in the wild to die, especially when they were deemed unfit by the family to raise. So, if the baby was born with some defects, they were deemed unfit. But it's very subjective because in that era, a second or third baby could be deemed unfit because they were seen as a burden to the family's economic well-being. Again, this wasn't a fringe practice. It was accepted by the community at large. I swear I'm not making this up. When the Spanish missionaries arrived, they were horrified by what they witnessed and moved to eliminate those practices right away. Historians also back up this low fertility regime where the birth rate was deliberately controlled to somewhere around three children per woman, which was super low for that era. Of course, if you push me on that figure, it's not like anyone was running demographic surveys in the 1400s Philippines, but we can reasonably estimate or extrapolate the numbers based on the population size, life expectancy, and what we know about child mortality at the time. What's clear is that in pre-colonial Philippines, female autonomy and low birth rates went hand in hand because women could choose deliberate family limitation through abortion and infanticide without any social repercussions. That is until the Spanish arrived.
Here's a fun fact. The collection of islands were named Philippines in 1543 by a Spanish explorer who named two islands after Prince Philip of Spain. Prince Philip would later become King Philip II and commissioned the colonization of the Philippines. So when Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, a Spanish colonial official commissioned directly by King Philip II, arrived in Cebu in 1565, his three objectives were of gold, God, and glory. He wanted to expand the Spanish Empire. He wanted to find new trade routes and resources for Spain. And he wanted to convert every Filipino to Catholicism. Accompanying him were the friars, members of Catholic religious orders who would go out into communities to preach, convert, and operate schools and churches. Think of them like the ground troops of the Catholic Church. And in the Philippines, they became extraordinarily powerful. The friars controlled education and health, kept the census and tax records, reported on the behavior of individual villagers to colonial authorities.
So, how do you think the Spanish perceived the Babaylan, the female tribe leaders, after witnessing the abortions and all the infanticide? The Babaylan were referred to not as community leaders but as "monstrous feminine" and "devil worshippers" for their rituals. So the friars broke their sacred ritual instruments, dragged them through villages, and burned them publicly. Babaylan who refused to convert faced imprisonment, torture, and execution. Some were even impaled on stakes. The Babaylan did fight back for another two centuries, but eventually, the Spanish won, not by killing every last one of them, but by making the world around them so thoroughly Catholic that the role had nowhere left to stand. This wasn't all forced on the populace, by the way. According to historians, many Filipinos came to realize on their own that there was something fundamentally wrong with the pre-colonial practices like infanticide, again, killing babies, and they genuinely embraced the new faith. So, Catholicism didn't just arrive as oppression. It arrived as order, as a framework that, whatever its flaws, offered something that the old system didn't always provide: stability.
So what did that mean in practice? Female virginity was instilled as a virtue for the first time. Abortion and killing babies were criminalized. Marriage became the only socially and legally acceptable context for sex and family creation. Children and large families were reframed not as a burden but as a divine obligation. And out of this new Catholic world came the woman every Filipino girl was told to be. Her name was Maria Clara, a fictional character from Jose Rizal's 1887 novel "Noli Me Tángere," the most important piece of Filipino literature ever written, which every single Filipino student is required to read in school to this day. Maria Clara is beautiful, chaste, deeply religious, and devoted to her family and the man she loves. She's essentially the Virgin Mary in civilian clothes. And for generations of Filipino women, she was the standard. In practice, this meant that a woman's virginity was her ultimate currency. Even as late as the 1990s, the landmark Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Survey found that a staggering 80% of Filipino youth completely disapproved of premarital sex. Virginity was culturally policed as a gift or a prize that a woman had to keep to maintain her social worth. Girls didn't approach men or promote themselves as happily single. Rather, they waited to be courted by the right guy. There was in fact a whole process called panliligaw. The formal courtship, sometimes years-long ritual where a man pursuing a woman would visit her family home, bring gifts, and slowly earn her parents' approval. The girl would play hard to get even if she was completely in love because eagerness was seen as unbecoming. And the destination at the end of all of this was marriage, usually in her early 20s.
And that's where it gets truly remarkable from a demographic standpoint. The population of the Philippines, which had set at roughly 1 to 1.5 million people across 7,000 islands when Spain arrived, began climbing. By 1800, it was approaching two million. By 1900, it had reached six and a half million. By the early 1950s, the average Filipino woman was having over seven children in her lifetime. The Catholic framework that the Spanish had built over three centuries had produced exactly the society it was designed to produce. By the time Spain was defeated by the United States in 1898 and handed the Philippines over to the Americans for $20 million, roughly $750 million in today's money, Catholicism was already so deeply rooted in Filipino culture after 333 years that no new government could dislodge it. The Philippines remains the largest Catholic country in Asia to this day. In that context, "no boyfriend since birth" was just what you were called while you waited.
So if everything was structured and conditioned for over 300 years for Filipinos to value children and big families, why did the birth rate start going down from its peak in the 1950s? Were there any specific trigger events? Honestly, we couldn't find any. Rather, what was happening in the Philippines was actually part of a much broader global pattern that even has a name. It's called the demographic transition. And it simply means this: As countries develop economically, birth rates fall every time. It happened in Europe first, then in North America, then East Asia, and by the mid-20th century, it was starting to happen across Southeast Asia as well.
But how does economic development make birth rates fall? The mechanics are actually pretty straightforward if you think about it. Back then, many children just died young from simple complications at birth, infections, and disease. We're talking about pneumonia, malaria, diarrhea, and severe malnutrition. So, what do you do when you're a Filipino parent and you see babies and little kids dying around you all the time? The rational response was to have as many children as possible. You have 10 babies and hope at least five or six make it. That changed, of course, as modern medicine improved dramatically. Vaccines, antibiotics, better sanitation, and improved care at birth meant that most children now survive. And that naturally reduced the pressure on parents to have as many kids as possible. And also, in a farming economy, children are, for lack of better words, assets. There was no such thing as child labor protection back then, okay? Children were an extra pair of hands working the land, bringing in income, and taking care of siblings at the same time while parents worked. So having seven or eight children made complete economic sense.
But the moment the Philippines began urbanizing from the 1950s, families started migrating into cities, mostly Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and the wider metropolitan area around the city called Metro Manila. Considering that at the beginning of the 20th century, more than four-fifths of the Philippine population was rural, the pace of the demographic shift was actually pretty crazy. Get this: According to a UN report, Metro Manila was attracting about 1 million new migrants every 5 years. And by the 1980s, the total urban population was growing at 5.14% annually. This was one of the highest urban growth rates in all of Asia at the time. That meant more families were crammed into smaller houses in the city. Children now had to go to school instead of working the land. And the calculation just flipped completely. Now a child wasn't an extra source of income. A child meant a school fee, a uniform, a tuition bill, and a bedroom you didn't have space for. As a result, families just made the rational decision to have fewer kids. By the mid-1970s, the birth rate had already dropped from over seven to around six children per woman. To be fair, this was a gradual decline that was still well above the replacement rate of 2.1. And this decline was on par with other Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia going through similar urbanization. Nobody at the time thought it would start falling off a cliff the way it would accelerate a few decades later, except something was slowly building under the surface.
From our research, we can attribute the crash to a number of factors. Let's go through each one. The first factor is the absence of a divorce law. That's right. Divorce is completely illegal for the general Filipino population. Most people outside the Philippines, including myself, might not fully grasp how absolute this is. In most countries, if your marriage falls apart, you go through a divorce process, right? It might be long, expensive, and emotionally draining, but at the end of it, you are legally single again. The marriage is finished, and you can move on. You can remarry, for example. Well, in the Philippines, that process simply does not exist. There's no form to file. There's no judge who can grant you a divorce. So, what does that mean? You only have two legal options when a marriage breaks down. The first option is legal separation. You're legally allowed to live apart, but you're still legally married forever, meaning you cannot remarry. The second option is what's called annulment. Annulment means the marriage was not valid to begin with because your spouse either lied or defrauded you or there were some kind of legal defects that should render the marriage void from the beginning. By the way, good luck trying to prove an annulment in court because you need a lawyer, a psychologist evaluation, multiple court hearings, and could potentially cost you over $10,000. The whole process also takes anywhere from 2 to 4 years. In a country where the average daily minimum wage in Manila is around $11 US a day, yeah, even getting an annulment would be virtually impossible. So that's it. Two options. And if you cannot afford annulment and don't qualify for legal separation, you simply stay married. It doesn't matter whether your spouse cheated, physically, or emotionally abused you. The government has no mechanism to release you from that marriage. None.
So, think about what the strict law actually incentivizes in practice. Most Filipino men in marriages that are falling apart just disappear. They walk out on their family and never return. Forget about enforcing child support payments. And remember, she's still legally married to him. So, even if the man walks out never to return, the wife has no legal path to move on or marry someone else. The system unintentionally makes disappearing the path of least resistance for men who don't want to be there. As of 2024, there are over 15 million single parents in the Philippines, and 95% of them are mothers. And a University of the Philippines study found that only 67% of young Filipinos were raised by both parents. That means one in three grew up without their father at home. And this problem of fatherlessness causes more damage to society than you think. How? For girls, growing up under a single parent, in this case without a father, means growing up without a male figure who models what a reliable, committed partner looks like. It means growing up without someone whose job it is to build your self-esteem and protect you from boys who don't have good intentions. According to a University of the Philippines Population Institute study, not having been raised by both parents is directly linked to a higher likelihood of teenage pregnancy, lower self-esteem, and lower life satisfaction among Filipino youth. It's not a coincidence that the Philippines ranks second in Southeast Asia for teenage pregnancy, with over 500 girls aged 15 to 19 becoming teenage moms every single day. And when those girls tell the boy they're pregnant, having learned from his own father that disappearing is an option and men don't have to take responsibility, the boy disappears as well. It's a vicious cycle.
But wait, you might think, doesn't teenage pregnancy actually increase the birth rate, not decrease it? Fair point. In the short term, yes. But think about what growing up in that environment actually does to a generation of daughters. They watched their mothers struggle financially after their fathers disappeared. A 2024 peer-reviewed study on fatherlessness confirms this further, finding that daughters who grew up without fathers report significant difficulties trusting men and maintaining open communication in relationships. So they grew up with life lessons that men are not to be trusted and that they don't need men. Worse yet, some might grow up resenting men altogether to the point they might not even want to get into a relationship with one. And if you don't believe me, even the teenage pregnancy rate itself is now declining. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority's National Demographic and Health Survey, teenage pregnancies among women aged 15 to 19 dropped from 8.6% in 2017 to 4.8% in 2025. Admittedly, 4.8% is still way too high for teenage pregnancy. But the pattern is clear. Girls are directly and indirectly impacted very negatively by the fatherlessness epidemic thanks to the no-divorce law. And this worldview that they don't need men is given the ultimate tool for women going their own way: education.
Here's a stat that might surprise you. According to the 2022 PISA results, that's the global standardized test given to 15-year-olds across 81 countries, Filipino girls outnumber Filipino boys by 14 points in math and 35 points in reading. That reading gap alone is equivalent to nearly 2 years' worth of schooling. Filipino boys are struggling significantly more. By the way, the Philippines now has the largest gender gap in favor of girls in student performance of any country in Southeast Asia. And every single year, more Filipino women than men are graduating college. Filipino women have outnumbered men in college graduation for over a decade now. That gap is now wider than the global average. On virtually every educational metric, Filipino men are falling behind. Look, I'm not interested in getting into the whole debate about gender gaps for the purpose of this video, okay? I'm just giving you the facts, and the facts show that all that education led somewhere very specific because timing could not have been more perfect. Just as Filipino women were outpacing men academically, the Philippines became one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global business outsourcing boom. The business process outsourcing, or BPO, industry started in the Philippines in 1992 when the first call center was set up in Manila. By 2010, the Philippines had actually surpassed India as the world's BPO capital. We've actually done a whole deep dive on the BPO industry in the Philippines. So, go check out that video after this one. But for now, here's what matters for our story. Guess who got the majority of those jobs? Filipino women. According to government data, women make up around 54% of the entire BPO workforce, the most educated demographic in the country, working in the fastest-growing industry in the country, earning their own money without having to rely on men.
But the BPO industry is only half the story. Because at the same time, millions of other Filipino women were doing something even more dramatic with their education. They were leaving the Philippines. You see, the Philippines has one of the largest populations of overseas workers in the world. In 2024, there were approximately 2.19 million overseas Filipino workers. And of those, 57.2%, roughly 1.25 million, were women working as nurses in the UK and the US, as domestic helpers and caregivers in Hong Kong and Singapore, leaving their families behind, sometimes for years at a time, sending money home every month. And all that money flowing back home changed who was in charge. Research confirms a growing phenomenon in Filipino families: the house husband. Men staying home, managing the household while their wives earn the income from abroad. Female-headed households now represent roughly one in four Filipino families. The women who were supposed to wait to be chosen by men for marriage were now the ones the whole family was depending on for money. So between the female BPO workers and the overseas workers, something fundamental had shifted. For the first time in their family's history, Filipino women had financial independence at scale. And that changed everything: how they saw themselves, what they expected from men, and whether they needed marriage at all. And perhaps most importantly, it may have changed what their Gen Z daughters grew up believing. If mom didn't need a man to survive, why would they, right?
The birth rate reflected exactly that. By 2000, it had dropped to 3.8. By 2013, it had fallen to 3.0. Still above average, but relatively gradual and manageable. But then something happened. Something that would trigger a freefall, completely tanking the birth rate from 3.0 down to 1.7. Social media. This brings us back to the emergence of the NBSB phenomenon. Remember how I said earlier that this started out as an internet meme in the early days of the Filipino internet? A self-deprecating joke girls made about themselves for not having a boyfriend. Yet, the rise of social media completely changed that. By social media, I'm specifically referring to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. By the way, did you know that Facebook is absolutely huge in the Philippines? As of 2025, over 104 million Filipinos, that's 86% of the entire population, have a Facebook account. And interestingly enough, Gen Z Filipinos are just as active on Facebook as all the generations, which is surprising because Facebook has a reputation everywhere else for being used mostly by older people these days. Filipino women make up the majority of the user base. And on top of Facebook, TikTok has 62 million users in the Philippines, with Filipinos spending on average over 40 hours a month on the platform alone. Basically, the Philippines is one of the most socially connected countries on the entire planet. And regardless of the choice of platforms, what do you think is something that social media excels at? Algorithms, right? To increase engagement, they just keep showing you more of what you want to see. And what this does to millions of young Filipino women is connect them. Women who grew up without fathers, those who learned firsthand that men cannot always be relied on, those who decided they don't need men to be financially independent and happy. Social media finds all of them and puts them in the same room. The comment sections fill up. The same girl energy starts spreading, and what had been a slightly shameful label all of a sudden started to feel like a cause to rally around as a community. Sure, you could argue that this is just an echo chamber, but the reality is social media didn't create any of the underlying societal conditions like fatherlessness. It just gave it a language, a community, and a global reference point.
Speaking of global reference points, Filipino women had no shortage of global content to draw from. The Western "girl boss" movement, Western influencers normalizing being single at 35 or 40, the Korean 4B movement, you name it. All of it filtered into Filipino TikTok and blended with the local NBSB identity in a way that made the whole thing feel not just acceptable, but genuinely aspirational. And social media didn't just connect Filipino women to each other and to global trends. It gave them something even more powerful: new role models. In the absence of father figures or traditional role models, young Filipino girls could find plenty of them on social media. Influencers, content creators, women building careers, traveling alone, documenting financially independent lives.
But here is where it gets distinctively Filipino. Do you know who else makes great role models for young Filipino girls that even their families would approve of? Filipino beauty queens. Beauty pageant winners. Now, if you're not familiar with Filipino culture, the Philippines is the most pageant-obsessed country in the world, and people take it just as seriously. Top contests like Miss Universe Philippines might as well be a national sporting event, like a Super Bowl. Miss Universe watch parties are organized nationwide. Every detail is dissected on social media. For example, when the Philippines won Miss Universe in 2018 with Catriona Gray, this wasn't just a sporting victory. This was a cultural moment on the scale of a Manny Pacquiao knockout. Here's what matters for our story. The old Filipino beauty queen archetype was the Maria Clara ideal: wearing a crown, grace, modesty, family values, a beautiful woman who would make a good wife. That was the template for decades. But somewhere along the way, the pageant itself started changing what it rewarded. Filipino queens were now expected to have career ambitions, opinions on global issues, and platforms around female independence and leadership. Now, to be clear, I'm not claiming beauty pageants are directly causing the NBSB trend. I have no research that proves that. I'm just making an observation that maybe, as a matter of correlation, the aspirational image that Filipino beauty queens now project lines up almost perfectly with the NBSB identity that's going viral on social media. If you're Filipino and watching this, I would genuinely love to know what you think about this correlation. The irony here is that even though beauty pageants are as mainstream as ever in the Philippines, traditional TV is giving way to YouTube and social media. So even pageant contestants and the organizations now have no choice but to build their personal brands online just to stay relevant. This means Gen Z Filipino girls who might not have been influenced by these beauty queens because they don't watch TV are suddenly exposed to more and more of them on their feeds. And they can all see these contestants making massive sacrifices of their personal relationships and getting rewarded with fame, opportunities, and influence. Can you see how this creates a powerful visual for NBSB-era girls in a modernizing economy where Filipino women outpace Filipino men in education and urban jobs? These pageant stories become living proof that the math can work without rushing into traditional family roles.
So, at this point, I want to add an important nuance here because the NBSB phenomenon is not as simple as Filipino women becoming "girl bosses" and staying single forever. In fact, for a lot of them, claiming NBSB is actually a way of signaling that they are high-value and highly selective. Think about it. If you're a well-educated, financially independent Filipina, you still want to meet a good man, right? It's just that you don't want just any guy. You want someone at least as successful as you, if not more. In the field of evolutionary biology, there's actually a well-documented term for this. It's called hypergamy. Now, technically, hypergamy can apply to both sexes, but the research is overwhelmingly consistent on one point: it is predominantly a female tendency. A 45-country study with over 14,000 participants found that women more than men consistently prefer partners with higher financial prospects across every culture studied. In other words, women tend to want to marry up, and they concentrate their romantic attention on the top tier of men. And the more educated Filipino women become, the more money they make. One could fairly argue that they naturally tend to gravitate towards the top 1% of men who get virtually all of women's attention.
Now, let's turn to the guys' side. Who are these top 1% men? And where does this leave the Filipino men who have their own "no girlfriend since birth" issues to deal with? This is where the dating gap becomes interesting because we first have to take into account the fact that social media and dating apps have truly globalized the dating market. What this means is that the dating options for Filipino women are no longer confined to local Filipino men. If they're going to go for the high-status men who stand out, all they have to do is open dating apps like Tinder. And suddenly they have access to wealthy Western men, successful expats, and increasingly Korean men. I swear this is not because I'm Korean, okay? This is actually backed up by peer-reviewed Filipino research. There is a 2024 study literally titled "The Relationship of Filipino Young Adults' Level of Viewing of Romantic Korean Dramas and Prospective Partner Idealization," which found a direct link between how much K-drama Filipino women watch and how high they set their standards for a romantic partner. Another separate Filipino research found that K-dramas have raised the bar for what Filipino women expect from partners to a level that, in the researchers' own words, now exceeds what Filipino men can possess. And while we're at it, it's also worth noting that the K-drama genre itself has evolved. Modern K-dramas increasingly feature strong, independent female leads with the male lead's entire role being to support an already complete woman. Now, putting aside the fact that what these super good-looking and well-groomed Korean actors are doing in these dramas is a totally unrealistic portrayal of Korean men because guys like that don't even exist in real life, okay? It doesn't stop playing into the female fantasy of their ideal boyfriend or husband. And once that standard, imaginary or not, is planted, real men get measured against it. And unfortunately, the men getting measured against it most directly are Filipino men.
Earlier, we already referenced the data that the average Filipino man is increasingly becoming less educated and less professionally accomplished than their female counterparts. If that wasn't bad enough for young Filipino men, they're falling behind before they even open their mouths. They're carrying the weight of a deeply rooted stereotype that Filipino men are irresponsible, unreliable, and destined to repeat what their fathers did. And even if they could overcome that and somehow prove themselves, they now have to compete with a K-drama effect, an imaginary boyfriend and husband material. It's brutal. That's why the male equivalent of NBSB, "no girlfriend since birth," is fundamentally different in nature. An average young Filipino man, no matter how hard he tries, cannot find a date or get a girlfriend, let alone get married, because Filipino women have their sights set somewhere else. And by the way, this is not just a Filipino problem. This is a global crisis facing young men everywhere. In the United States, six in 10 men under 30 are currently single. One in five young American men report either not seeking relationships or struggling to find partners at all. Unless you're in the top tier in terms of looks, wealth, or status. The general consensus among young men appears to be that if you're totally average, you won't even get a shot. Of course, the flip side of this is that the top 1% of men have endless options.
And do you know how this actually backfires on well-intentioned but increasingly high-status Filipino women? Every time they go for high-status men, whether they be Western expats or Korean men, they quickly find out that these men might only be willing to date them casually without any serious commitment. And it's entirely possible, and true in many cases I've seen, that they could disappear after a few dates because, again, they have options and they might not want to settle. Ironic, isn't it? Of course, I'm generalizing here, and I'm sure this is not how all high-status men behave. I've met some really good guys with strong principles and values, and I would like to think I'm one of them. But I've also seen clear patterns. High-status men simply don't have the same incentive to settle as everyone else does. The point is, the more casual hookups and situationships Filipino women experience with these high-status men, the more they get jaded by men in general, including the genuinely good local guys that they were never willing to give a chance to begin with. And as you can imagine, this only widens the gap between Filipino men and women, pushing more Filipinos deeper into the NBSB identity, almost as a defense mechanism, while pushing more Filipino men into the involuntary NGSB category.
So, what does all this mean for the Philippines? It means the birth rate of 1.7 will almost certainly drop further and faster. And here's why that's bad news for the Philippine economy. Let's say it drops all the way down to Japan's level of 1.2. In practice, a 1.2 birth rate hits the Philippines far harder economically than it hits Japan. And the reason comes down to what economists call the "aging before becoming rich" problem. Countries like Japan started getting older and having fewer children after they had already become wealthy. Japan's per capita income was already very high by the time its birth rate crashed. That meant Japan could still afford to build massive pension systems, elder care infrastructure, and healthcare systems. It had the money to at least attempt to manage the consequences. The Philippines is doing the opposite. Its population is aging and its birth rate is crashing before it has built a wealth cushion. The average daily minimum wage in Manila is still around $11 US. There's no universal pension system that covers most workers. And by 2030, just four years away, the Philippines crosses the threshold where elderly dependents start becoming a significant burden on the working-age population. So the nightmare scenario is fewer young Filipinos working to support more elderly dependents in a country that never built a system to handle that transition.
And to make matters worse, the very industry that gave a generation of young Filipinos their financial footing is now under threat. According to the International Labor Organization, 89% of BPO jobs face a high risk of automation from AI. The entry-level call center jobs that handed millions of young Filipino women and men their first paycheck, those are exactly the jobs AI is coming for first. So, what happens to an entire generation of young Filipinos when the economic foundation they built their adult lives on starts to disappear? And what does that mean for a birth rate that's already in freefall? Honestly, there are no easy answers here. The Philippine government is already taking some steps. For example, they launched an upskilling program in January 2026 to retrain BPO workers for higher-skilled, AI-proof roles. But the single policy change that could make the biggest difference to the marriage rate and, by extension, the birth rate is the divorce bill. That's right, finally making divorce legal. The bill passed the House in 2024 but remains stuck in the Senate, still fighting powerful opposition from the Catholic Church. But if passed and people could get legally divorced, I don't know, men might actually be more willing to formally commit if they knew there was a legal exit ramp. Women might be less terrified to enter marriage if they knew they wouldn't end up as single parents should men just run away.
The hard truth is, though, there is no magic fix for all this. No government initiative will likely undo decades of the fatherlessness epidemic and young men of the Philippines checking out of the system and being left behind. Maybe the most important thing is, and this is relevant for all the gender conflict taking place all over the world right now, reminding ourselves that this isn't really about giving more power to women over men or vice versa. In the end, we're all on the same team, and if one side falls, we all fall together.
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