I wish all the women in Singapore a very Happy Women’s Day. I salute you for your perseverance, courage and strength and wish you all the best in your multiple roles.
Women in Singapore have come a long way from the earlier days of ignorance, exploitation and poverty, where we played very marginal roles in our society. We have seen progress in all areas; in education, at work, at home and in society. We now have women who are permanent secretaries, lieutenant colonels and judges.
Even in previously male dominated fields such as taxi driving, there are now female taxi drivers, including one that wears a tudung. My deepest impression of taking a taxi was when I returned from an overseas trip one day and was pleasantly assigned at the airport taxi stand to a woman driver. After exchanging some pleasantries, she immediately handed me a copy of the Sunday Times to read. She told me that since I had been away, I must be eager for the latest home news. I was very impressed as something like that had never happened to me before. It may be a small gesture but it goes a long way towards epitomising women, caring and always with an eye for details.
We have made progress in the political arena too. We now have a record number of women politicians, with 10 standing on the PAP ticket at the last General Election.
Are we satisfied with this progress? To say that we are is the first step to regressing.
That women have progressed from their/our historical positions –where we had nothing of rights-is not enough. For society to move on, for equal opportunity and, yes, equal rights, to be reality, we have to benchmark women’s progress with what men already possess in terms of rights and access to resources.
Women’s strive for equal status, equal rights have never been about pitching women against men. Or men against women. It is about enabling women and men to have an equitable share of a country’s resources, opportunities and equal share of responsibilities so that we may have a happier and more peaceful co-existence. Such a cultural climate will be more conducive to sustaining society’s progress and prosperity.
What remains clear, however, is that more needs to be done to uplift women’s position and to truly integrate them into all spheres of our society. We need to see more women in key leadership positions, and a more purposive way of integrating them into decision-making levels, both in the public and private sectors. We now have two women permanent secretaries, but we hope to see more in other Ministries as well. We also hope that there will be women heading the statutory boards or the GLCs, where women are conspicuous by their absence. For a start, there should be a lot more women being appointed as directors on these boards.
We have to stress that what women are seeking is not symbolic representation or tokenism. And we are well aware that there is no deliberate attempt to exclude women. The problem lies with the fact that there are just so few women rising to the top ranks. But if we really wish to address this imbalance, then a lot more will have to be done and we should begin by analysing and understanding the underlying causes for women’s slower pace of growth and development. It will be too easy to say that there are just not enough women and therefore there is nothing that can or should be done.
As women constitute 50% of our population, it will indeed be a great waste if their resourcefulness, creativity and potential are not fully tapped. Imagine how much better our society could have been and how much faster Singapore could have progressed, if there had been more effective participation of women. As we restructure our economy, and look at new ways of making ourselves more competitive, more opportunities could be opened to women. In the new economy, it is not just technical skills that will be important, but of equal relevance will be the softer skills which women are better at.
To address the imbalances, we have to create an enabling environment for women. And to do this, we need to first to scan the whole system and understand how the existing environment may have operated to prejudice or impose obstacles on women. How we project women through advertisements, stories, books, magazines, movies, in our private conversations and in our public discourse are relevant considerations. How do we bring up our children – do we tell our daughters that they cannot achieve as much as their brothers – do we unconsciously impose restrictions and barriers and impede their growth, do we restrict their opportunities? Is work structured in such a way that it is difficult for women to participate effectively?
The existing rules in most workplaces is based on the old model where the man is the main breadwinner and the woman stays at home. So people can work very long hours, without worrying about the family. Is that realistic today, with many dual income families, which have increased exponentially over the years? Do we need to restructure the rules and the way work is organised so that people can have a decent family life, while earning decent wages.
The social norms and values which stereotype women are borne from years of socialisation. They are not easy to dismantle but act as powerful forces which influence behaviour and interactions at all levels of our society. One stereotype is clearly how we treat unpaid work at home. Imagine if you have to pay for the services of a maid, many probably cannot afford it. Yet economically, there is no value attached to women’s work at home, and in that way women’s contributions to the economy is reduced.
The ILO’s way of bringing about gender equality is through the rights-based approach. The ILO has established a number of international labour standards to prevent discrimination against women. Such standards are useful in that they set a framework to guide norms and behaviour. Once a convention is ratified, it will have to be implemented in law and practice. The Singapore government will be ratifying Convention 100 on equal pay for work of equal value this year. This is the second convention that Singapore has ratified since 1965 and it is therefore a very significant move. Of equal significance is that this second convention which Singapore is ratifying concerns women.
Convention 100 reaffirms the basic tenet of fairness at work. But creating rights alone is not sufficient to ensure that women actually benefit from these rights. There are countries which have ratified all the non-discrimination conventions but where women still occupy a very inferior status. It is pertinent, therefore, not only to create rights for women but also to have a development strategy in place that will enable women to exercise these rights. Hence, ratification of this convention alone does not mean that automatically the wage differential of 30% between men and women will disappear. Some mechanism would have to be put in place to determine the causes for this differential and subsequently to address them.
In conclusion, we must continue to empower women and create an enabling environment for women to grow and develop. Some of the things that we can look at are :-
For these steps to be effective, society (and government) have first to acknowledge the legitimacy and need for securing women and men from gender-based constraints.
We cannot expect generations that have grown up with the old values to know how or where to change things.
A good place to start would be to introduce gender sensitisation programmes in schools and in the workplace.
On this note, once again, I wish all of you Happy Women’s Day.
Thank You.
