Empowering Women

Mdm Deputy Speaker, the Motion calls for a whole-of-society approach to remove barriers that impede women from free participation in society. I would like to focus my speech on female participation in political leadership.

Question: how does Singapore fare right now in women political leadership?

I believe we all accept that women must be a big part of this House. Women must not just be a big part of this House; women should hold leadership positions in Government and in political parties. Over the years, this House has seen progress. For decades before 1984, the House was all male. After the 1984 General Elections, three women were elected on the ruling party ticket – Dr Aline Wong, Dr Dixie Tan and Mrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon. They made up about 3% of the total number of Members of Parliament. Today, the House is touching 30% women, a 10-fold increase. We have female Ministers, we had a female Speaker, we continue to have female Leaders of the House.

How are we doing if we compare ourselves globally? The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) puts out a country ranking of the percentage of females in national legislatures. Singapore, with its nearly 30% female Members of Parliament, is ranked 54th in the world. When one looks at the countries above Singapore, they are an incredibly diverse mix of countries at different stages of development. Singapore lags significantly behind the Nordic countries as well as Rwanda and the UAE which have between 40% and 61% of women legislators. We are doing slightly better than the USA at 27% and about on par with Germany and Australia which are at 31%.

When one looks at the list of countries with high proportions of women legislators, one will notice that certain countries which are not known for gender equality seem to be high on the list. Therefore, while the numbers matter, we should not have women fill places in Parliaments for its own sake, if they do not play a meaningful role. Let me take an analogy from the corporate world.

The Singapore Government has been advocating that boards of companies should aim to have 30% of women directors. In order to reach 30%, some family-run companies may be tempted to appoint female family members, but that would not be meaningful if these women did not exercise independent decision-making.

To that end, it is somewhat reassuring to see that in Singapore politics, there is an increased presence of women playing influential roles. There are more female Ministers in Cabinet than ever before, helming Ministries. But we want to see more. There are also more female opposition Members of Parliament than ever before. We want to see more of them, too.

But what will it take to increase the pool of able and willing female Singaporeans entering the forefront of politics? Any political leader in Singapore will know that it is more difficult to find women to stand as candidates in Parliamentary elections.

I count myself fortunate that I did not face any family or societal pressures when I decided to join the Workers’ Party 20 years ago. Not having a spouse or children, I did not need to agonise over how the family would cope without me at home at night, or how their lives and morale would be affected by nasty media headlines and the testy exchanges that take place in this House from time to time. As for my parents, they are persons of great fortitude. My mother is a retired nurse who has seen life-and-death emergencies. As for my late father, he simply laughed it off on learning that I had joined the Workers’ Party, saying, and I quote: "Congratulations. You are one step closer to prison". I consider myself fortunate.

Other women are not so free. Time and again, we find potential female candidates who are unable to freely decide whether to stand as candidates, compared to males who seem to have fewer inhibitions. I believe the Workers’ Party is not unique in this experience. Women, especially those with young children, are burdened with worry and even guilt, wanting to be there for their families at key moments of their children’s development. The expectations of family members, particularly parents and parents-in-law, add more pressure to mothers. Employers, too, may doubt a working mother’s ability to cope with her work and political responsibilities as well. I do not notice such pressure and apprehension in my dealings with potential male candidates.

I should clarify, at this point, that I am not saying that a woman who decides that her family is the most important thing to her is somehow under-achieving or under-contributing. Far from it. What I am saying is that we should empower women to freely make these choices. Women should be confident that, in their ecosystem, family responsibilities are shared. They should be confident that their contributions to the wider society are cheered and supported, and not seen as derelictions of their duties as mothers, daughters and daughters-in-law.

Some countries have tried to boost female participation in their legislatures through the imposition of legal quotas. I am personally very wary of going down this route, which has led to some perverse outcomes elsewhere. I learned of this a few years ago when I was part of a Commonwealth delegation observing a national election on the African continent. Several female politicians shared that their experience with legal quotas had not been good. Their national elections had proportional representation systems of affirmative action for women. Political parties would put up lists of female candidates, who would be assured of entering Parliament depending on their party’s overall vote share at the polls. Unfortunately, in some instances, women who wished to be prioritised on the list were subjugated to the whimsical decision-making of their male party leaders, including acceding to humiliating demands. We should not go down this route of legal quotas.

On the other hand, more countries seem to have had sustainable success with soft targets or aspirational quotas. These voluntary targets serve as benchmarks to aim towards, without being overly rigid in application. Some countries saw political parties voluntarily setting party quotas, promising the electorate that they would field at least a certain percentage of women candidates. This happened due to political competition, as political parties jostled to gain support from a more demanding electorate and, especially, from female voters.

Although political parties in Singapore have not announced any voluntary quotas of women candidates, my observation is that the parties are, indeed, conscious of the need to field at least a minimum proportion of women. Let me cite some numbers. If we look at the last General Election, on the ruling party side, nearly 27% of the candidates were women, while on the Workers’ Party side, nearly 24% were women. After Polling Day, female PAP Members of Parliament formed about 29% of PAP Members of Parliament, while female WP Members of Parliament formed 30% of WP Members of Parliament. As for the Progress Singapore Party, they fielded about 21% of female candidates and, after Polling Day, two Non-Constituency Members of Parliament were elected – one man and one woman.

At the decision-making levels of the parties, the Central Executive Committees (CECs) of both the PAP and the WP are still male-dominated, but to different degrees at the moment. The PAP has three female CEC members out of 18, making up about 17%. The WP CEC has four women out of 14, making up 29%; though this is a vast improvement from the 14% we had previously, I am most mindful that this gain is precarious and can easily unravel. The PSP has five women out of a 14-member CEC, a healthy 36%. When it comes to the Cabinet, we see three female Ministers out of 20, which is 15%. It seems to me that all political parties can put in more effort to try to raise the levels of female participation in leadership.

I am cautiously optimistic that we may not need to adopt even voluntary quotas to improve the situation. As has happened in other countries, the element of competition amongst political parties in Singapore will also result in the need for parties to field more women candidates and promote women leadership. The electorate will be watching us.

However, given the social context, it will not be an easy slog unless the whole of society embraces policies which make it conducive for women to step up to the political forefront.  I now turn to the relevance of gender equality in society to fostering increased female participation in politics.

Madam, the Motion posits that there is a link between gender equality and the empowerment of women to freely realise their full potential. It is thus relevant to ask whether a society that nurtures a gender-neutral culture will organically see more women in politics.

Gender equality assessments across countries are regularly done, and there are reports and rankings of gender gaps worldwide. For instance, in March this year, the World Bank published the Global Gender Gap Report 2021. This report assesses gender gaps in countries across four fields – political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, and health and survival.

Of all the four fields assessed, political empowerment is the one with the largest gender gap worldwide. If one looks at the top 10 countries deemed to be the most gender neutral, one sees that eight out of these 10 are also in the top 25 for female representation in their parliaments. These include the usual suspects such as the Nordic countries, as well as New Zealand, Namibia and Rwanda. According to this gender gap assessment, Singapore was 54th globally, coincidentally the same ranking we received on the percentage of female representation in Parliament.

An academic study of 36 European countries was published last year which attempted to test certain hypotheses as to why countries might have higher or lower percentages of women in their parliaments. The study tested two hypotheses – the first was whether higher percentages of women parliamentarians were found in richer countries measured by GDP per capita; the second was whether the proportion of women parliamentarians was co-related with the country's character as measured on a Masculinity Index.

The Masculinity Index was determined based on a variety of factors such as: the importance of money, high economic growth as a priority, men earning more than women and traditional family structures. Such masculine traits were to be contrasted with the Femininity Index which valued caring for others and the quality of life. Singapore was ranked in the middle of this scale. The study found that a higher proportion of women in parliament was strongly co-related with a country's wealth but also with a low score on the Masculinity Index. Three Nordic countries – Norway, Finland and Sweden – exemplify this.

Madam, it stands to reason that a society with a culture of gender equality will be more conducive to women being empowered to make free choices, including the choice to devote oneself to political service. For instance, more equal sharing of childcare and eldercare responsibilities will ease decision-making for women. Wage levels should be comparable for equivalent work, so that it may make economic sense for husbands to decide to work part-time or not at all. Flexible work arrangements will unlock possibilities. The list goes on.

Singapore should continue in this direction if we wish to see sustained streams of women contributing to their full potential, including those who will step forward to serve as political candidates, Members of Parliament and Ministers.

In order to attract more women into political leadership, we need all segments of society to work together to build a gender-equal ecosystem. Government, employers, employees, business and family must buy-in to this vision, in order that our wives, mothers and daughters can fulfil their aspirations and contribute to public life if they wish to.

Madam, over the weekend, some of us might have been fixated with watching world-class athletes compete at the Tokyo Olympics. One of the moments that moved me greatly was the victory ceremony for a relatively new event in swimming – the four by 100m mixed medley relay. It was so refreshing to see the teams of four swimmers at the victory podium – two men and two women – showing the world the glory that their combined effort had brought to their countries. Each of them, man, and woman, was equally critical in achieving the team's success. That is the spirit in which the whole of society can collaborate in the national interest.

Mdm Deputy Speaker, others in this House have shared about why a society that is not truly gender-neutral is problematic from a political, social and cultural perspective. Allow me, if I may, to contribute to this discussion from the economic point of view.

Unsurprisingly, discrimination of any form, whether on the basis of race, religion or gender, entails not just visible costs to the social and moral fabric of society, it also embeds hidden or, at least, under-appreciated, costs for the functioning of our economy. In this speech, I wish to bring some of these potentially hidden costs to light.

There is now a substantial body of evidence pointing to the importance of gender equality for economic development.

Economic historians have argued that one of the important contributors to the Great Divergence, when European Civilization was able to overtake Qing China, Mughal India and Tokugawa Japan, and the difference was the so-called "European Marriage Pattern": a pattern of delayed female marriage, elevated female celibacy and the formation of small, nuclear-family households. The idea is that by improving the position of women, this pattern increases both labour force participation and encourages greater investment in human capital, which serves to promote long-term economic growth.

This argument has since been rigorously tested against data from around the world and the results are clear: greater gender equality tends to be associated with higher growth. Remarkably, the relationship works both ways: not only does empowering women benefit development, but development, in and of itself, can also be a force for suppressing gender inequality, which holds the potential for a virtuous circle of ever-greater empowerment, followed by development.

Remarkably, this insight that gender equality and female empowerment are a force for economic progress was most pithily expressed not by a paragon of capitalism, but by an icon of communism. In encouraging women to pursue education and work outside of home, Chairman Mao Zedong famously proclaimed that, 妇女能顶半边天 or, literally, "women hold up half the sky", an allusion to how women can, and do, contribute mightily to the success of the economic endeavours of a nation.

Closer to home, Singapore has, like many Newly Industrialised Economies (NIEs) in East Asia, steadily improved the extent to which women are engaged as productive members of the economy. Between 1990 and 2019, for example, the female labour force participation rate has risen from around 45% in 1990, to around 62% in 2019, the latest year that data are available and, unfortunately, a number that differs from Minister of State Sun Xueling's earlier citation, unless I misheard, of 76%. This represents an increase of a little less than a third, which is notable, nevertheless, for an advanced economy.

It is also significantly higher than rates among our NIE peers, which average closer to 53%, and also surpasses that of developed southern European nations such as Greece and Italy, where participation hovers in the low to mid-forties. Clearly, we have, even in more recent times, managed to encourage the entry of women into formal employment.

Alas, this impressive quantitative success masks some deeper, and possibly more worrisome, pathology.

For starters, participation has trended slightly down over the past five years. To be clear, I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, suggesting that women should always seek to increase their engagement in the workforce, come what may. Indeed, some retreat from working life may well be a calculated choice, reflecting a desire to spend more time in homemaking or the pursuit of other interests, such as hobbies or philanthropy, which may be enabled by higher incomes from the main breadwinner.

But we should not be blind to the possibility that some of the fastest growing sectors, such as technology, finance and data science, are famously male-dominated, and reduced participation could be symptomatic of the difficulty that women face in breaking into such lucrative professions, thereby inhibiting the further expansion of labour market entry by women.

Furthermore, there remains a significant imbalance in the participation rates of men versus women. Over the same period, the male participation rate continued to outstrip that of women, ranging between 78% and 79% over the past three decades. Put another way, the ratio of female-to-male labour force participation is around 0.79, substantially below Scandinavian countries, where the ratio is closer to 0.9. So, we know that greater egalitarianism is eminently possible.

Another reason that constrains further participation by Singaporean women is that they are still often expected to take on the primary responsibilities of caregiving and housework in the family. Hence, asking women to hold down a job and advance in their careers, while also taking on domestic work, effectively consigns women to a double shift, or equivalently, juggling two jobs. Often, the added burden compels them to either leave the workforce or reduce their hours to part-time employment.

The numbers corroborate this story: in Singapore, 83.4% of married men were employed in 2017, while in contrast, only 63.3% of married women stayed in the workforce. By a similar token, women are over-represented in part-time jobs. For that same year, women accounted for 64% of part-time labour force participation, almost twice as many as men, who accounted for the remaining 36%.

This latter statistic underscores the main obstacle preventing greater female labour force participation – time constraints. Of course, working part-time could well be a lifestyle choice I alluded to earlier, which should be available regardless of gender. But with only 47% of firms in Singapore offering full-time, flexible work arrangements, many women find themselves taking on part-time jobs not necessarily by choice, but rather because their employer either refuses or fails to offer alternatives that would allow them to continue working full-time, especially after the birth of the child. In my meetings with residents, I have had many women express difficulty in convincing their employer to agree to more flexible work arrangements, which relegates them effectively to part-time status.

A third force may discourage women from entering the labour force with more vigour: the gender pay gap. In Singapore, this income differential is around average compared to other industrialised economies, at 16.3%. To put this number in context though, this gap implies that, to a worker earning the median salary over a 40-year career, this discount experienced by women amounts to around a little more than a third of $1 million.

Of course, women's career choices and progression paths, based on differences in personality and preferences, along with the values placed on workplace flexibility and societal norms surrounding certain gender roles do affect this difference. To compare durians to durians, it is necessary to account for these observable and explainable differences. Doing so turns out to half the gap to around 6%. This is smaller, but still non-trivial; after all, this is the average annual increment over two to three years, which never goes away.

Furthermore, we do ourselves a disservice if we simply accept that wage differences can be accounted for and, hence, excusable. After all, as I explained above, a desire for flexibility should be regarded as an accommodation to a woman for taking on the additional, unpaid duties at home, not a perk that would engender – no pun intended – a discount to this worker's salary. Similarly, societal norms about the appropriateness of certain jobs for women – such as in tech and finance, as mentioned earlier – can and should be changed, as there is little clear inherent advantage held by those possessing the Y chromosome in performing these jobs.

Clearly, Mdm Deputy Speaker, these subtle forms of gender discrimination in the workplace – expressed in dollars and cents – remain real and present in the contemporary Singaporean economy.

COVID-19 has now presented itself as a genuine opportunity for us to seize upon and rectify this discrimination.

On one hand, the pandemic has hit women harder than men. The need to take on an even greater burden of managing the household as they work from home, has meant lower productivity, higher stress and greater burnout. Such feelings of stress experienced by those working from home even outstripped the amounts reported among frontline workers. If doing double shift as a woman was already stressful pre-pandemic, how much more difficult would this have been when parents also had to take on additional educational and childcare responsibilities during lockdown periods, such as the circuit breaker in 2020, or Phase Two (Heightened Alert) this year. Hence, many women went from a dreaded double shift, to an unbearable triple.

But the pandemic has also starkly revealed how working from home was not just plausible, but more than possible. It strikes me that firms expecting a return to business-as-usual look increasingly misguided. Much like how the Black Death permanently catalysed a dramatic realignment of wages in medieval Europe, COVID-19 will induce a comparable rethinking of employer-employee relationships. The future of work may well be irreversibly flexible.

Will the Government follow this trend, then, in institutionalising clear, flexible work arrangements, starting with the Civil Service? In addition to a four-day work week, which my Sengkang teammate Louis Chua has previously raised in this House, we can consider an alternative work schedule: add an hour to each workday, which adds up to a long weekend every fortnight. I am certain that many working mothers and fathers, for that matter, would value the opportunity to spend an additional day with their children, enjoy a long weekend, or even to attend to more mundane chores that are easiest to perform on a weekday.

Mdm Deputy Speaker, I believe all of us in this House agree that the ultimate goal is straightforward: we strive for a Singaporean workplace where one's gender has no bearing whatsoever on one's ability to succeed.

This, ultimately, requires our leadership – our top administrators in the public sector, our civil society visionaries and our captains of private industry – to fully buy into this vision of a gender-neutral workplace. But in the meantime, to get there from here, we will require policy changes, policy nudges; there remains an insufficient number of female leaders to ensure that diversity and inclusion expand organically. That is why the demonstration effect from Government is so crucial.

There are many practical steps to promote greater gender diversity in corporate leadership. Hurdles for women to participate in high-performance leadership training – such as how heavy travel commitments preclude young mothers, or underweighting certain emotional and social competencies in assessing leadership suitability – should, as much as possible, be removed. We could also consider a limited number of reservations for female representation on board memberships in GLCs, to preclude the possibility of total non-representation. This is especially so since, in contrast to electoral representation – as Aljunied Member of Parliament and my colleague, Ms Sylvia Lim, mentioned earlier – where there is palpable pressure from political competition, similar pressures are often significantly weaker in the corporate world, to the extent that the gender composition of board memberships even matter to the decisive shareholders.

The rank-and-file need support, too. Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan has made enormous strides in increasing the participation of women in its traditionally male-dominated offices, by dramatically expanding childcare facilities for working mothers. In a number of non-mature housing estates, especially Sengkang, the constituency that I represent, the ratio of childcare and Primary schooling facilities to eligible-aged children still lags the national average, because even as the absolute number of such facilities has grown, the number of children has grown even faster, resulting in a relative worsening.

Similarly, we can consider paid re-entry programmes for mothers and informal caregivers, to ease their re-integration into the workforce, post-childbirth or after a period of time as the primary caregiver. Programmes can be designed to refresh and update skills, tax relief can be offered to employers that operate successful re-entry programmes, to strengthen incentives for adoption.

And when these opportunities have been offered, our women have eagerly answered the call. In 2020, more women have taken up board seats in Statutory Boards, companies and institutions of public character. Notably, however, the target of at least a fifth of board seats in the top-100 primary-listed companies was missed.

Finally, going beyond participation, we should look more seriously at ameliorating the gender pay gap. While corporate governance matters are, ultimately, incumbent on the leadership of firms themselves, the Workers' Party has emphasised in its manifesto that employers with 10 or more employees should report their gender wage gaps, for the same job, to the MOM. MOM should then go on to publish aggregated and average pay gap information for each industry sector. Remuneration disclosure guidelines for SGX-listed firms should also be revised to encourage the routine publication of the gender pay gap in their annual reports. The Government should also render support to firms – especially smaller ones – for both the routine collection of such data, as well as offer strategies for how such gaps may be reduced in practice.

The Indian Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen observed that India has as many as 100 million "missing women" – as a result, he claimed, of gender-selective abortions – which is a travesty not just on a demographic and economic perspective, but a tragedy from a moral, societal and cultural one. But let us also not be blind to the fact that there are missing women in our workplaces. There are also hundreds of thousands of missing women that is a shortcoming that we can and must collectively resolve.

As Members of this House may know, I have a young daughter. Like every parent, I want her to grow up in the best possible world, one where she is able to pursue her dreams – whatever they may be – independent of whether she happens to possess a Y chromosome or not. I hope that we can all agree that this is why all of us need to work together to realise genuine gender equality in our Singaporean workplaces.