Why sociology is needed in social policy
In today’s post, Athena Charanne Presto, a doctoral researcher at the School of Sociology, Australian National University, explores the intersections of gender, policy, and care. Drawing from her experience teaching social and feminist policy in the Philippines and working with institutions like the United Nations Development Programme, Athena illustrates why embedding sociological insights into policymaking is not only necessary but urgent.
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As a sociologist working in the fields of gender and social policy, I’ve long observed how the near absence of sociological perspectives in policymaking leads to consequences that are neither incidental nor neutral. This gap exists in many country contexts, but I have especially seen it stark in the Philippines where much of my work is based. Despite the wealth of sociological knowledge on inequality, our insights are often left out of policy design and implementation.
One recent example illustrates why articulating the above knowledge gap matters. The recently proposed Parents Welfare Act of 2025 (Senate Bill No. 396) in the Philippine Senate seeks to strengthen filial responsibility and penalise adult children who neglect or abandon their aging, sick, or incapacitated parents. On its surface, the bill appears to respond to a pressing social need to ensure that older Filipinos are not left behind. But a sociological lens reveals that, rather than addressing the real conditions of eldercare, the bill risks reinforcing inequalities further.
Sociology draws attention to what is normalised in society, and therefore those unseen and taken-for-granted.
In the case of the proposed Parents Welfare Act, the bill fails to consider that care work - particularly within families - has long been feminised and invisibilised. The proposed bill’s assumption that children are failing to care for their parents ignores the continued, often unpaid caregiving already being performed mostly by women. This labour is seen as a natural extension of being a daughter or granddaughter, not as work that deserves compensation and formal support.
The proposed criminalisation of neglect reframes care not as a collective responsibility but as an individual legal duty, detached from the structural conditions that shape people’s ability to provide support. It glosses over what feminist analysts call the care penalty, or the cumulative disadvantages women experience due to their concentration in unpaid or underpaid care roles. These include lower lifetime earnings, reduced career mobility, fewer social protections, and poorer retirement outcomes, among many others. The mentioned Senate Bill’s silence on these realities speaks volumes.
More than exposing what remains invisible and silenced, a sociological perspective also challenges and reshapes how we define and understand social problems in the first place.
Consider the example above, which frames the problem of eldercare as filial responsibility. While laws mandating support for elderly parents exist in other contexts, such as parts of Europe and North America, these are typically framed in relation to welfare systems, not cultural or moral obligations. In the Philippines and other Asian societies, however, familial care is often moralised, relying on the language of piety and sacrifice. To be clear, cultural norms are not necessarily problematic in social policy, and indeed, in many instances, they have served as potent tools to nudge community members to certain acts. Nonetheless, in this specific example, a filial piety framing makes it more difficult to imagine care as a public concern, as it reinforces gendered expectations.
Social policy, at its best, should respond to both lived realities and structural conditions. Sociology helps us interrogate whether laws and programs reflect those realities, or whether they are built on assumptions that obscure power relations. The Parents Welfare Act above contain assumptions that are fragile at best, and harmful at worst. To name a few, it assumes that family ties are always emotionally intact, that those ties can be translated into financial support, and that adult children are materially capable of fulfilling such obligations.
A sociological perspective will see that eldercare is indeed a serious issue, especially for an aging society, and any serious attempt to address it should begin with improving access to care. But the same perspective will also enable us to see that what is needed is a comprehensive eldercare strategy, which includes interventions such as funded services, cash support for caregiving families alongside proper monitoring mechanisms, or even subsidies for children providing care work, all towards a broader recognition of care as a shared social and institutional responsibility.
Sociology gives us the tools to ask: Who is doing the care? Under what conditions? At what cost? And with what kind of support or recognition? These questions are central to any meaningful policy. Importantly, these questions showcase how the more sociology is sidelined in policymaking, the more likely we are to see policies that entrench, rather than dismantle, inequality.
About the author: Athena Charanne ‘Ash’ R. Presto is a doctoral researcher at the School of Sociology, Australian National University, where her research focuses on the intersections of gender, policy, and politics. She taught social policy and feminist policy at the University of the Philippines Diliman and the Ateneo de Manila University, as well as worked with international organisations like the United Nations Development Programme on gender and development. See more of her work: https://ashpresto.com/.
Moderator: Molly Saunders