More women-friendly practices needed

SINGAPORE — The lack of women in positions of leadership or with decision-making power and the need for women in the workforce came in for a lively discussion at the Singapore Women’s Congress yesterday.

Only 81 per cent of women who graduated from Harvard University in the early 2000s and 49 per cent of women who graduated in the 1990s are working full-time, said Malaysian columnist and women’s rights advocate Marina Mahathir in her keynote speech at the event, which was organised by MediaCorp.

There is a need for better work-life balance, as “with education, women no longer are satisfied with simply staying home” but want successful careers while marrying and having families, she added.

Also highlighted at the congress was the need for women-centric policies, such as a reasonable amount of maternity leave and laws against sexual harassment.

As Singapore continues to grapple with falling birth rates and a labour shortage, the Singapore Government has moved to better support companies in improving work-life balance for employees in the recent Budget announcements, aiming to encourage women to rejoin or remain in the workforce.

Senior Minister of State (Law and Education) Indranee Rajah had earlier stressed the importance of societal change in her opening speech, saying that the issue of flexi-working hours is something very “current”, which the Government is “actively looking at to see how we can support”.

“Our approach has been, at the moment, not to legislate it as yet, but to see whether we can get all the stakeholders to do it as something that becomes a norm,” she said.

While Ms Marina made a case for legislating that 30 per cent of all decision-making places should be allocated to women, fellow panellist Eleanor Wong “categorically disagreed”.

Ms Wong, a playwright and Director of the Legal Skills Programme at the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Law, said that in her opinion, gender discrimination was not the issue in Singapore.

“It’s the conventional status quo discrimination against those who are different and think differently, and that’s what we have to fight. That cuts across men and women,” she said.

Earlier, she also pointed out that it surprised her that “anyone needs to ask the question whether women are ready to lead or that we should somehow think that a woman leader ought to be good for women … I always thought we ought to choose people for jobs because they’re good at it, and the job of a leading politician is to be good for everyone, men and women”.

Also discussed yesterday was the issue of women in politics and business.

It was noted by Ms Marina and other panellists that even when women politicians are elected, they tend not to “empower other women” or are “afraid to bring up issues concerning women” as they know “they will get too little support for them”.

While women occupy only 6.9 per cent of company board seats in Singapore, 24 per cent of parliamentarians here are women, slightly above the world average of 20 per cent, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

However, Ms Laura Hwang, President of the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations, noted the “unprecedented” number of women who contested for political positions in the 2011 General Election, signalling that Singapore is headed in the right direction. “We had women in just about every single ward,” she said.