Are We Done? Women’s Issues in Singapore

Her Story, SCWO's 25th Anniversary, Celebrating Womanhood

(editor, Tisa Ng, page 66-67)

Are We Done? Women’s Issues in Singapore

By Braema Marthi

It’s is seductive to put women’s rights on a back burner, lean back and just enjoy the low lying fruits on the tree of gender quality. It would be lovely to put one’s feet up and reap the benefits of the efforts of women who have helped to advance the women’s cause.

Their advocacy has resulted in education as a right, paving the path for women to become economically independent and to have greater flexibility in career and family life choices. This is a good place to be.

We only have to compare ourselves with women in countries where living in abject poverty drives them to prostitution, and it is already easy to become complacent and lull ourselves into thinking that we are accomplished and have achieved gender equality.

But let me be a party pooper and recall that Singapore is a developed country, a first world nation. As such, it makes better sense that we benchmark our progress against that of developed countries or that we use Gender Development Indices to measure our progress. Given that, Singapore is very open to globalization, we also need to measure our progress against the changing landscape of the world.

Globalisation has made it necessary that we keep on learning new skills to maintain our own economic relevance. We have seen that today’s market can disappear as soon as a cheaper one appears and that any gap in IT knowledge is detrimental to that individual in a wired Singapore.

Based on just these two factors- that we are a developed nation and that we are impacted by globalisation - I would like to say that we need to look beyond the low lying fruits of equal access to basic education, access to health, and access to citizenship rights for children. We need to continues to advocate and remain focused on some primary areas that will affect all of us for the next ten years, at least.

Let’s first drop our overly cautious and inconsistent approach in affirming gender equality. The Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE)’s Beyond Babies Report shows that gender equality were decisively put in place in Denmark with laws in the 1900s, and then it took more than 50 years before the mindset changes to one where today Danish men and women share equitably their household, childcare and workplace duties as a given principle for successful relationships. So no more “men as heads of household statements”, I say, as we learn from Denmark.

While there’s much that we still need to do, what needs to be on our advocacy radar will include:

• the widening disparity in CPF savings between men and women as they grow older, and the dilemma of managing the health costs of women as they live longer and remain vulnerable to more ailments
• the need for constant and appropriate training opportunities and financial empowerment courses to help women remain employable in the face of structural unemployment in a globalised world.
• The increased susceptibility of women, primarily homemakers, to HIV/Aids due to their partner’s careless safe-sex practices with sex workers, whose numbers have increased here and in nearby countries making the services easily accessible.
• The patronage women still face through disparaging remarks in social discourse, in the media and in jokes.

While it is easier to accept that women in Singapore have got most of their rights and ought to, gratefully, not contest the issue of women’s rights anymore, and some of us may indeed wish it could be so, it only makes sense to reach out for those fruits higher ip the gender equality tree.

The climb continues. And in that climb, lest we forget, let’s be global citizens, and not limit those fruits to just our own citizens as there are many foreign women here who ought to have more access to those fruits too..