Last month, I was happy to be involved in the nationwide exercise to get Singaporeans to talk about their aspirations about the Singapore they want in 15-20 years time and beyond, what is officially called Our Singapore Conversation.
One of the topics that was discussed was that of work-life balance, what I’m conveniently going to refer to as WLB in this blog. There was no argument that WLB is an important issue that needs to be tackled because it is at the heart of the White Paper on Population which was recently debated in Parliament.
Women are the primary care-givers at home, manage most of the household matters and are also expected to contribute to the household income by being gainfully employed. A very tough act to follow. Which is why many are either choosing to be full-time home-makers or to work full-time with no intention to get married or have children.
Singapore’s TFR or Total Fertility Rate of between 1.2 – 1.3, is well below the replacement level of 2.1 required to have a stable population and is one of the lowest in the world.
But how can we achieve TFR of 2.1 when there is’nt a sturdy support infrastructure in place in Singapore for women to marry and procreate and continue working? When women do the sums in their heads it just does’nt add up. The opportunity costs of giving up a career or foregoing that promotion in anticipation of one’s greater role as a mummy at home is not compensated by the greater perceived social or personal well-being and happiness of raising a family.
As our Speaker of Parliament, Mdm Halimah Yacob said, “we must never put women in that position where they have to choose” between one or the other.
This is a multi-faceted problem which is linked to other broader issues like the role of men in society, the role of fathers and husbands at home, the availability and easy accessibility of child-care centres, flexi-work arrangements at the workplace, etc., etc..
But perhaps the one, single and quintessential question that women and society have to answer is perhaps what Mdm Halimah has already alluded to. Why can’t women have it all? Why should they have to choose between career and family?
This is now a global debate which has caught fire, ignited by a couple of renowned women leaders interestingly, from the media industry.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has written a book, entitled, LEAN IN: Women, Work and the Will To Lead, where she addresses these very questions and got some very strong reactions. In the book she maintains that women often hold themselves back when it comes to career advancement in the workplace because they “lean back” instead of “leaning in” when it comes to assuming leadership positions in the workplace.
Business Insider gives a great list of controversial quotes from the book which you must take a look at.
But many women felt that Sandberg was out of touch with the regular ordinary women who are not wealthy, do not have access to the connections and people of influence like she had, who are not married to wealthy men and who do not have domestic help who take a considerable load off supervision of the household.
Joanna Coles, Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan, however, came to Sandberg’s rescue by saying that all Sandberg was doing was to bring the issues of the lack of women in leadership positions in industry and WLB to the forefront of our national consciousness and to spark a national (and international) conversation on these matters.
In order to get a general feel of how extensive this problem is, we could perhaps look at MasterCard’s Index of Women’s Advancement
If Sandberg is to be the judge, Singapore, like many of the other Asia-Pacific countries in the survey done by MasterCard, fares poorly in the survey which seeks to measure how far women are from men in terms of socio-economic parity, in three areas – employment, education and leadership.
An index of 100 indicates that women from the country are equal to men and a score below 100 indicates inequality in favour of men and a score above 100 indicates inequality in favour of women.
Overall, Singapore had an above average score of 67.5, which was below those for Australia and New Zealand with scores of 76 and 77.8 respectively. What was surprising was the Philippines had the best score among all the 12 Asian countries surveyed, with 70.5, but all showing that parity with men is still a distance away.
In terms of overall leadership, Singaporean women, garnered a score of 36.5, lower than NZ, Australia and the Philippines. Looking more deeply, in terms of business ownership, Singaporean women had a score lower than China, Vietnam, Thailand , the Philippines, NZ and Australia. Under business leadership, women here performed better but still lost out spectacularly to their Filipina counterparts who topped the survey with a stunning score of 114.3, indicating a reversal in the gender inequality norm.
It is clear from the above figures that Singaporean women (and women generally) have some ways to go yet to reach socio-economic parity with men.
But the question again is whether women are their biggest obstacles in the fight to reach equality with men especially in the area of leadership in industry and government? Are they not “leaning in” enough as Sandberg puts it? To tackle issues head on, to be competitive, to crave and trumpet success because it goes against what they have been programmed to be from young – to be nurturing, peacemaking, inclusive and understated.
As a man I feel like I am disqualified from answering this question, especially since it appears that Sandberg is calling for women to act more like men in the workplace, which according to some feminists, is the ultimate insult.
But just to add more spice into the mix, there is another corporate leader who is making waves and ruffling more than a few feathers – Ms Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, another media company.
She hit the headlines when she cancelled telecommuting at the workplace at Yahoo after returning from a 2 week maternity leave following the birth of her son in September 2012. The uproar came about because it flew in the face of the well entrenched WLB movement which supported things like telecommuting, flexi-work arrangements and other family-friendly HR policies.
However, Mayer was hired by Yahoo specifically to do a job and that is to rejuvenate the struggling company. And telecommuting policy has to be applied with discretion as there are some job specs that just cannot be done from home.
Furthermore, the CEO of U.S. electronics retail chain, Best Buy, Hubert Joly, did the same thing and it hardly raised a whimper, which led some to question whether the tirade against Mayer was rooted in gender-based bias.
So it appears that when women do make the tough decisions, they do so at the risk of being judged as uncaring, not being pro-family, or even being too aggressive. As a result women become ever conscious of their actions thus “leaning back” instead of “leaning in” and getting the job done in the most effective way possible.
At least that is what Sandberg appears to be saying and its something that women all over the world should be taking some time out to ponder and reflect on and generate a national conversation of their own and get the men involved as well while they are at it.
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